We were really happy with our results at this year's FIRA Hurocup competition in Bristol, UK. The FIRA Hurocup is one of the oldest robotics competitions in the world, and currently consists of a wide array of events, from basketball free-throws and obstacle races, to unified soccer (having your robot join a team that is not pre-arranged), and all challenges must be run with the same unmodified robot.
This year, we came in second in unified soccer, and ranked fourth in weightlifting and the marathon, and fifth in sprinting. See the Gallery for many more images, and the Videos section for related footage. Congratulations to the team and thanks for the hard work of our lab members.
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.
Our initial video debuting Jennifer the hockey-playing robot was entered in a competition at the ICRA conference in St. Paul. One component of this competition is viewer votes. Please have a look at our video, and the others in the competion, and cast your vote for the best video here!
Our work with Jennifer, our new autonomous hockey-playing robot, was featured tonight on The Discovery Channel's Daily Planet. It was a really great shoot, and we'd like to thank the Bisons for coming out and adding to the action. You can jump to small (50 MB), medium (100 MB) or large (200mb) size versions of the video (6:16).
