Jennifer, who you last saw outside playing Hockey and is one of our most experienced FIRA HuroCup robots, has now learned new skills: cross country and alpine skiing. Cross Country and Alpine skiing is our entry to the 2015 DARwIn-OP Humanoid Application Challenge at ICRA-2015 in Seattle in May (ICRA is the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society's flagship conference ).

This is the latest extension of our work furthering our research into dynamic balancing and walking under realistic conditions. The changing nature of snowy ground, and the rapid control response required by alpine skiing, present significant challenges to gait design and dynamic balancing in Humanoid Robots, as does the challenge of operating this equipment in cold weather.

Please see the Youtube Video for Jennifer in action, and thanks to Gadgetify for creating the gif below from it. This work has really made the rounds of the media, including CBC, CTV, FOX (we like the phrase "the future looks adorable!"), Der Spiegel, German Radio 7, The Winnipeg Free Press, Metro, many international papers through the UPI, IEEE Spectrum, Gadgetify, Design Engineering, Motherboard on Vice,, CNet and Tomorrow Daily.