Students at the University of Manitoba are making remarkable strides in the crucial field of hockey-playing robotic humanoids. Meet Jennifer, who can shoot a ball with a stick and shuffle across the ice. This, incidentally, equals my contributions in any backyard game.

A webcam attached to Jennifer's head allows her creators to aim shots, but the robot does all the actions herself. She's so independent.

“I was surprised nobody had tried this before,” scientist Chris Iverach-Brereton said Tuesday. “There’s a lot of Canadian and North American teams of computer scientists . . . but being the first ones to do it — to our knowledge — is pretty great. I’m pleased with the progress we’ve made, but there’s a lot more progress I want to make. Just because we’re the first doesn’t mean we’re going to stay the best.”

The next step for the team is to improve Jennifer's skating abilities.

“We want to improve a great deal and have proper skating and really precise stickhandling,” Iverach-Brereton said. “There’s a lot of avenues we can go with this.

“By May, my personal goal is to have the skating down and have (Jennifer) be able to push off one foot and glide.”

[H/T: BroBible Reader be4be]