Topic: World's First Ice Hockey Playing Humanoid Robot

[laucian_meliamne]

Hello everyone!  I've been absent from these forums for a really, really long time.  School's been keeping me busy.  Busy doing what you ask?  Lately I've been working on this little robot named Jennifer, believed to be the world's first humanoid robot to ice skate and play hockey:

Humanoid Robot Ice Hockey Player

We created the robot for a competition coming up in May to develop a new application for humanoid robotics.  Since nobody's done ice hockey before, and since we're a Canadian university, this seemed like an appropriate project.

25% of the score for the final competition is based on an online poll, located here:

::: discussion ::: - [2012 ICRA] Online Vote for the Best DARwIn-OP Application

(The remaining 75% is based on the research itself and a demo+presentation at the ICRA conference in May.)

I strongly urge you to check out all the entries in the poll and vote for whichever one you think is best.  There are 11 teams (9 from the USA, 1 from Canada, and 1 from Spain) competing.  Naturally I would prefer if you vote for our hockey playing robot (we're team #2 "UofM Humanoids -- Jennifer" in the poll, just FYI), but please vote for whichever team you think has the coolest/best robot application.

And if you have any comments/questions about Jennifer, please feel free to leave a comment either here or on the YouTube video.  Thanks a lot!

[Hades Hound]

Oh yeah... I remember this video popping up on Puck Daddy's daily headlines a few weeks back. Congrats on building it, looks pretty sweet.
Got any plans for icing a full squad? And if so, who's coaching the lot? (For the love of God, don't say Guy Boucher or Jacques Lemair)

[laucian_meliamne]

Puck Daddy?  Haven't heard of that site.  I'll have to add it to the list of placed we've been linked from.

Eventually we'd like to have a full team of hockey robots.  We've only got three of these robots in the lab right now though, so we're a bit short-handed.  Hopefully we'll get enough for a full shift + a goalie.  One of my supervisor's colleagues from Japan has already issued an informal challenge to a Canada/Japan robot hockey game at some point still to be determined.

[Grand Master Lomandalis]

Wait a sec... didn't I see something about this robot on Daily Planet?

[Hades Hound]

Wow, rather surprised you haven't heard of PD. It's one of the biggest hockey sites around.
I don't know how easy a time you'd have tracking down the post he put it in, simply because it was one of the Daily Headlines posts, which tend to end with a cool video, and as the name suggests, are released daily. You'd have to go back a ways though, at least 2 weeks.
A Japan/Canada game with robots... sounds like the great leveler. You play your national sport using their national heritage 
The good news though, is that these are robots you're dealing with. You can dress 5 and a goalie and you're set. They won't want to die on the ice the next time they get hemmed in their own zone after 3 straight minutes of penalty killing against a very aggressive puck moving squad.

All the best with the project though, keep us updated please.

[laucian_meliamne]

To be honest, I don't actually watch hockey.  I just program robots to play it.  It's a weird state of affairs, but it seems to be working.

The Canada/Japan robot hockey game would be pretty cool.  There have been several robot soccer games between a whole range of countries (including at least 3 or 4 continents).  Nobody's ever tried ice hockey though, so I'm looking forward to seeing how it goes.  I doubt it will take off as a big league or anything like that, but a few one-off games/tournaments could be fun.

Grand Master Lomandalis: yes, you probably did see us on Daily Planet.  A crew came down to the university a couple of weeks ago to film a piece about the robot.  The link to that video (for everyone who may not have seen it) is here:  Daily Planet : March 06, 2012