Jennifer is a Robot That Skis and Plays Hockey
Posted on June 20, 2015
Jennifer is a robot from the Autonomous Agents Laboratory at the University of Manitoba. Jennifer can ski and play hockey. Jennifer can handle both cross country and alpine skiing.
This video shows Jennifer's cross-country and alpine skiing skills. A previous video of Jennifer playing hockey can be found on YouTube.
Getting Jennifer to ski required a lot of research in dynamic balancing. The different types of snow covered ground and the rapid control response required by alpine skiing both posed a challenge to the researchers. The robot recently took first place in the 2015 DARwIn-OP Humanoid Application Challenge at ICRA-2015 in Seattle. Jennifer also won the 2012 ICRA Humanoids Application Challenge.
To downhill ski the robot needs to be able to slow itself while skiing to avoid wiping out. Mashable reports that Jennifer has mastered the plow. Jennifer uses custom-made wooden skiis and ski poles made by a student.
For the cross-country skiing the researchers developed a heavily-modified walking gait for Jennifer that was inspired by their previous work on ice skating and hockey playing in 2012. The gait included lengthening the stride and lowering the vertical amplitude.
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