Thanks to the hard work of our lab members, we came out ahead of eight other finalists from across North America to win the ICRA 2012 DARwIn-OP Humanoid Application Challenge. The competition involved developing new applications for humanoid robots. Our entry began with our earlier video submission of Jennifer, the hockey playing robot. Our work on Jennifer since this debut has included better control and balancing, and work on using both ice skates and inline skates. Jennifer is named after Jennifer Botterill, the Canadian three-time Olympic gold medal hockey player.
Out of the initial submissions, eight finalists were chosen to present their work at the ICRA conference in St. Paul, MN. We were impressed with the stiff competition. More information on the competition can be found here:
Winning this competition has brought us another much-appreciated piece of research equipment: another DARwIn-OP to add to our hockey team. The support software is also much appreaciated.