todd calls our team ‘relentless’. I like that.
Monthly Archive for August, 2007
Hey Folks. Due to popular demand, I’ve put up high quality video files from all of our RoboCup 2007 matches. Check them out on our media page. Just a warning: they are big files.
Just run some updates on the server. We are now running the latest version of Wordpress, Apache2.2 (our http server), and a few other services. Nice to keep up with security upgrades. Also, if you take a look at the URLs of the links, you may notice something different, and if you’re a long-time follower of the site, something familiar. We are now running once more with the PrettyPermalinks option in Wordpress, so articles, pages, and comment are linked via the date and title of the posts. Old links still work, such as http://robocup.bowdoin.edu/blog/?page_id=176, but are much more convenient as http://robocup.bowdoin.edu/blog/media/, or http://robocup.bowdoin.edu/blog/2007/08/24/beautiful-aibo/.
This is part of a ridiculously good photo set of RoboCup 2007 by Glenn Zucman that I found tonight. There are a ton of good shots of our team in here. Thanks Glenn, for making these available!!
UPDATE::Check out the Slideshow.
http://robocup-cn.org/. Just a shell, though, no content yet.
From Jan Hoffmann. It includes some great shots of RoboCup, and then from the Dagstuhl Seminar, a small conference organized by and for the RoboCup elite.
Here’s what the Four Legged League trophy looks like, circa RoboCup 2006 in Bremen.
Part of a slow-coming but technically proficient series of diary entries from the RoboCup 2007 competition:
-Day Zero
-Day One
-Day Three
Day 2. The Second Day. RoboCup World Championships 2007. Here we go.
This day was by far one of the most infuriating days in RoboCup history. It all came down to the lighting. First off, we only had three fields. Three fields for 24 teams. Last year in Germany they had four fields, and none of them were practice fields. They were all game fields. Secondly, the lighting, even by the morning of the second day of set-up, was horrid. The lighting inside the Fox was really dim to begin with — I myself had deluded visions of ghosts past in the team room — and the beams on the fields were not enough. Joho was up there on those ladders with his flip-flops in hand finding lighting solutions with Naomi, the spunky NUbot vision guru. We all got to the venue @ 7 am to meet with lighting guys who were supposed to show up.
The morning was kind of a blur, as of course the lighting guys didn’t show up right away. The lighting guys came, and after much appeals from myself and Chown-Dawg, a real boss came and was not happy with the progress. He sent out for more lights, the best solution we could think of, and when they came back, things started to click in. The new lights were, according to Joho, what we needed.
The email from Thomas Rofer:
Dear Teams,
the RoboCup Federation has decided to accept the proposal of Aldebaran Robotics (http://www.aldebaran-robotics.com) to provide their humanoid robot Nao as successor of the AIBO in the Standard Platform League (the former Four-Legged League), at least for two years.
The Four-Legged League is renamed to “Standard Platform League”. The main property of this league is that all teams the same platform, i.e. there is no hardware development. In 2008, there will be two competitions: The AIBO competition (for the last time) and the Nao competition. We currently assume that there will be 24 teams in both competitions together (e.g. 8 teams in the Nao league and 16 in the AIBO league).
Aldebaran Robotics will starting the production of the Nao in the beginning of 2008. They plan to be able to provide 2 robots to a limited number of teams at the end of February 2008 and another 2 at the end of May.
The pricing is currently intended to be:
Single Nao: 4500 Euro + VAT
RoboCup Package of 4 Naos: 11000 Euro + VAT
Additional Nao if you already bought the RoboCup package: 3600 Euro + VATThere will be an official call for participation later. However, for planning purposes it would be nice to know how many teams would like to participate in the Nao league under these conditions. If more teams are interested in participation than Aldebaran Robotics can provide robots for, there will be some kind of qualification procedure.
Since the “Four-Legged League” is renamed to “Standard Platform League”, there now exist a number of aliases for the existing sources of information:
http://www.tzi.de/spl (currently just a forward)
spl_tech@tzi.de
spl_orga@tzi.de
spl_web@tzi.deThe 4legged/legged variants will keep working for quite a while.
Best regards
Thomas Röfer
This feels right. As long as the robot is able to move around reasonably well, this league could prove to be very popular. They knew what they were doing: while all other companies were focused on building the most hackable, flexible, upgradable solution, Aldebaran made a really great looking robot. As long as it’s not a dud, that’s all that matters. It brings excitement to the league.