Monthly Archive for February, 2007
-Team Report Finished (finally)
-Jeremy got our python matrix library super optimized in C and free of memory leaks with help of valgrind.
-We’re doing cool work with shared ball and multiple robots sending each other communicated information
-Mark and I got a killer sub behavior working: tracking the ball way better than last year. We can kick the ball ridiculously fast across the floor and the dog does a good job at following it.
Tomorrow Chown and I are fieldtripping it to the nearest carpet distributer. We’re trying to build a new full-sized field for practice and competition. Our field is 8/9’s of the side of a regular field, but that 8/9’s can really mean a lot in terms of finding the ball and coordinating a team of mobile robots.
Link. [mcsweeney's]
Due to an error on the host machine, this time, we experienced another period of downtime from last night, Feb. 19, to today, Feb. 20. Network connectivity has been restored to the server, and the blog, trac, svn, and media are all running fine after a few reconfigurations. This particular problem is now a reoccuring error on the VMWare server that hosts our machine, and will hopefully be resolved, as it affects not only our own server but several others as well. Hopefully no one was delayed from working to long last night, but all should be in working order today.
Here is our application paper.
Here is our video in low resolution (8.7mb), in medium resolution (77mb), and in high resolution (178mb).
Here’s hoping we get a chance to compete in our second RoboCup!
Go nBites!
Our blog had a short amount of down time recently, due to an error on the server. To get technical, a few uncleaned caches resulted in the /var partition filling up, leaving the mysql server without enough space to operate. Thus, the blog, which using Wordpress on Apache2 and stores it’s data in a MySQL database, could not load this data. The offending caches have been removed, and the mysql and apache services restarted. Everything is now running normally. A few changes should result in this not happening again.
In two words: a lot.
We’ve written a lot about our team for purposes of qualifying for RoboCup 2007 and to give report on what we did in 2006.
We’ve made the plans to attend the German Open 2007 — where we will be only one of two english-speaking teams there and the sole representative of our continent.
We’ve made a lot of upgrades to our lab: new lights, freshly painted goals, new lines, new posts, and most beautifully, four new Apple 23″ HD Cinema Displays. I nearly fainted at the sight of the new monitors.
We’ve been working hard on getting our localization system up to snuff and have been revisiting lots of different low-level systems. Our progress here has been substantial: our dog has a pretty decent idea of where it is using only two posts to localize from and with some significant vision hurdles left.
So, we have this big application for RoboCup 2007 coming up due in the middle of next week. We’ll have a video, team report, and application available to all who desire it by then. Stay tuned.
Three challenges this year:
1. Open Challenge. This is standard-fare every year — you get to do whatever you want (as long as its scientific) to show off for the RoboCup community.
2. Passing Challenge. Didn’t go so well last year, so we’re doing it again.
3. The New Obstacle Challenge. This is going ot be awesome, you simply have to check it out.