Robot Hockey Player of the Day: Students at the University of Manitoba’s Autonomous Agents Laboratory have created the first-ever autonomous robot hockey player.
The ‘bot — named “Jennifer” after Canadian three-time Olympic gold medal hockey player Jennifer Botterill — can skate, handle a puck, and shoot.
Jennifer needs some work when it comes to doing all of those at the same time, though. It’s based on the DARwIn-OP robotics platform, which includes a ball tracking feature, but the system wasn’t designed to aim a puck at a goal while moving sideways.
The University plans to enter Jennifer in the 2012 DARwIn-OP Humanoid Application Challenge, a contest for Darwin robots that’s due to take place at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Minneapolis this May.
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