Great, now if we have to flee to the mountains to escape the inevitable robot uprising they’ll be that much better at tracking us dow—WAIT, OH NO, WHY IS THIS ROBOT SO CUTE. I’m trying to hate you on principle, robot, stop wearing TINY HOCKEY JERSEYS AHH LOOK AT ~YOU~.
Named “Jennifer” (named after three-time Olympic gold medal hockey player Jennifer Botterill and NOT Jenny from My Life as a Teenage Robot as I’d so valiantly hoped), this adorable child-sized robot has already been taught to skate and play hockey by students from University of Manitoba’s Autonomous Agents Laboratory—they even won an international competition for their efforts in 2012. Now the team is working on her cross-country and downhill skiing skills for the 2015 DARwIn-OP Humanoid Application Challenge being held in Seattle this upcoming May.
Lab co-director Jacky Baites notes, “We have only begun studying alpine skiing, but have demonstrated rudimentary braking and arcing using simple control of the skis’ edges. Improving the control of the alpine skiing is our primary focus, with improving the cross-country gait and allowing the robot to dynamically switch from cross-country to alpine skiing when it detects a change in inclination corresponding to a hill.”
Jennifer might not win any speed competitions in skiing—or in hockey, below—but she certainly wins in our hearts for being frickin’ precious. If the robot uprising involves all of our future overlords looking like babies in little hats, I think I might be okay with that.
(via Gizmodo)
Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?
