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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Hockey-playing robot scores gold
HANDOUT Jennifer the hockey-playing robot. (POSTMEDIA)
It turns out Jennifer the hockey-playing robot has lived up to her namesake, Olympic gold medallist Jennifer Botterill.
The robot, the brainchild of a University of Manitoba robotics lab, captured gold at an international robotics competition in St. Paul, Minn., last month.
"No one, to our knowledge, has looked at a humanoid, hockey-playing robot," said team member Chris Iverach-Brereton, a second-year master's student in computer science. "The competition was basically to push the boundaries of what these robots can do... of what hasn't been done before."
The International Conference on Robotics and Automation took place in mid-May and was hosted by Korean company Robotis, the makers of Jennifer's robot base.
The team worked to program the DARwIn-OP robot to skate, which was not an easy task, said Iverach-Brereton. They made little skates and a hockey stick for her.
For the competition, Jennifer shuffled along on rollerblades, since ice was hard to find.
"We were thrilled that it paid off as well as it did. But there's still a lot of work we can do to get her to skate better, play hockey better," said Iverach-Brereton.
The team beat out 11 other teams for the top prize, winning another DARwIn-OP robot valued at about $12,000, and software totalling $15,000.
"It was really exciting (to win)," said Diana Carrier, a third-year computer science student on the team. "It meant it was totally worth missing school and worth all the hours of watching it fall on its face and waiting in the cold."
The third member of the team is Jacky Baltes, a robotics professor who supervised the project.
Their next project is gearing up for the Robot-Olympics in Bristol, England, in August, where they will design one robot to compete in sports such as wall climbing, marathon, basketball and weightlifting.
Watch our video on the hockey-playing robot from February 2012:
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 14, 2012 B3
History
Updated on Friday, June 15, 2012 at 9:56 AM CDT: amends to remove reference to "interchangeable parts" re: next robot they are working on
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