The three of us going back to Bowdoin just made it in after 31 straight hours of travel. Now that I’m back on campus with reliable internet and access to iMovieHD I will do my best to get footage off the DV tapes and edited before I leave in a day or two. Cross your fingers.
Beating the University of Texas at Austin, we have placed third at RoboCup in China. Four of us sped off the airport (carrying our robots) immediately after the game, while the rest were able to go on stage during the closing ceremony to receive our trophy. The ceremony was very impressive — complete with fireworks and an awesome trophy — outdoing Bremen in 2006 and dwarfing Atlanta in 2007.
This is the fifth trophy the nBites have won in two years, winning 3rd at German Open 2007, 1st at RoboCup 2007, 2nd at German Open 2008, 1st at US Open 2008, and 3rd at RoboCup 2008.
Hi all, sorry for lack of updates here - I can only post here at the hotel.
Bowdoin Pride:
We beat SharPKUngfu 9-0, UTAustin 4-2, and TecRams 10-0, the last of which we played this morning in the quarterfinals.
We played our semifinal match today against the GermanTeam, and it went scoreless after two halves. This meant that the game went into penalty kicks. Unfortunately our goalie veered out of the box and couldn’t stop their incredibly powerful cannon shot. It was a heartbreaking loss, but members of the GermanTeam claimed it was the best Aibo match they’d ever witnessed.
We play either UTAustin or Wright Eagle for third place tomorrow at 11am (pm est).
We bring you another podcast. First day of games, Naos play soccer (sort of). We had a larger crew talking tonight, so the levels aren’t wonderful. I may remaster it at a future point.
Whoops, first added this is a page and not a post…
Sorry for the late blog entry, we were all a bit beat last night and I didn’t have internet access in my room.
We purchased fans from a local store in order to beat the heat in the venue, and it made things unbelievably nicer and more comfortable.
We spent some time yesterday getting more pictures of the second field; fortunately both fields look relatively uniform in terms of lighting.
We attended a symposium talk towards dinner time that was about human and robot interaction. The speaker posited that not only do humans need more sensory feedback from robots (e.g. tactility or haptics), but that robots need more bio-data from humans (e.g. heart rate, blood pressure, impedance of the skin) in order to know when we’re stressed or physiologically abnormal. For instance, in a virtual reality program, things might appear bright red for hot and blue for cold; to a color blind person this would not be meaningful information. If the system knew about that physical limitation, it could tailor its representation of the temperature using a means other than color. A lot of the things he talked about were very far into the future, but he provided a nice overview of man/robot interactions in the past.
After dinner we had a test Aibo scrimmage against Wright Eagle. If you remember, Wright Eagle was the one team that beat us last year. Unfortunately they beat us once again last night, 3-0. Video of the scrimmage to come. A lot of the problems we think stem from trying to save our game robots and use alternates instead.
– Today
We had our first Aibo match against Cerberus which we won 5-0 6-0. However, they had major wireless issues (which is often the case at Robocup we’ve found) so the level of play was not quite up to what it would have been had the wireless worked.
We had our first Nao match against UT-Austin which resulted in a draw, 0-0. As of writing, all games have ended the same way, with no goals. The refs have to be babysitters to ensure the robots don’t totter over and break themselves, which nevertheless happened a few times.
I only have reliable internet access here at the hotel, but I will try to get the videos up as soon as possible.
The title says all. More to come.
My battery is about to die but figured someone might want to see a picture from China
Our day in redux because I am very tired:
We woke this morning at 5:30, got some delicious dumplings and sweet purple sticky rice for breakfast. Took the shuttle to the Venue (20 minutes or so away), our big robot cases just barely fit.
Check-in was a bit of waiting in line, but we got it squared away quickly, and got upstairs to claim our tables. We quickly setup are mobile lab and got developing - Tucker and Henry and Andrew on the Aibo - Elise, Nick working on color tables / picture taking / vision, Jeremy working on Nao systems, and Jack and I on behaviors / Nao vision.
First thing in the morning we got Aldebaran to flash our PSOC camera controllers in hopes of getting a better handle on the camera driver, but to no avail. Instead our robots kernel panicked on boot, and we we unable to use the Naos until very late in the day.
Aibos doing well - orange and yellow are very close, and lots of bars in the images from the frequency of the lights. Otherwise, fields well lit. Internet is very spotty/ non -existent, so we setup our own svn server at the venue.
Naos have a walk that is working, and tomorrow we will get to try a reverted version of our camera parameters, see if we can chase a ball.
Look for a podcast soon.