Monthly Archive for April, 2008

2nd place at German Open 2008

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Joho
on April 28, 2008
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On Friday we finished second in the four-legged-league at the German Open 2008. We played the German Team in the finals, and lost 1-2 in regular time. Last year we finished 3rd, and lost 0-8 to the German Team. Looking over the video of the final, we were still struggling to find and grab the ball, as well as to stay localized on such a large field, leading us to shoot next to the goal sometimes, as well as choose the wrong kick sometimes. Overall, the experience was really good for us - remote competition is definitely a different beast than competing in person, but it does help us pin point many areas for improvement. Take a look at the video of the first and second half.

Getting a chance to play on a larger field in not-so-great lighting conditions is really useful because we can only fit a 72% size field in our lab. Once class get out next week, we’ll move into a bigger space where we can have both the Nao and the Aibo fields out at once. Also, we’re planning to have a public scrimmage the weekend after this during reading period - exact date and time to be announced soon.

With some more work over the next couple months, our second meet-up with the German Team in China is going to be an exciting game.

Northern Bites competes remotely at the German Open

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Joho
on April 22, 2008
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Today kicked off the first day of the German Open 2008, in Hannover. This is the first time we’ve ever tried to compete in an event without actually being there. It is also the first time we’ve ever played on a 5×7.5m field. Although these hurdles might seem trivial, I was ecstatic to see them actually play real soccer in our first test match. To setup our robots, we get images and logs over the internet from the German Team, who have agreed to help us and Cerberus compete remotely.

Despite some technical issues, we were able to produce a decent calibration, and have for the first time, ( to my limited knowledge) played another RoboCup team remotely. In our test game against the german team, both teams remained scoreless after 10 minutes of play, though the German Team came awfully close to scoring on us once or twice. Soon after, we won the first regulation game against Cerberus 7- 0.

Looking at over videos of our performance, it looks like we are having some issues with getting accurate ball distances, as well as some issues with our kick not performing so well occasionally. As always, wireless connectivity is extremely buggy, and it appears our communications were lagging a bit in our game against Cerberus. After some debugging in our lab today, tomorrow should bring better performance in our color table, as well as slightly better role switching.

Read after the break for some technical details about remote competition: Continue reading ‘Northern Bites competes remotely at the German Open’

Nao setup: first impressions

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Joho
on April 11, 2008
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Out of the box, the Nao didn’t do anything interesting. The boot up time is about 3 minutes, after which the eyes flash, and the processor fan starts. Then nothing. With the robot off, we’ve been playing with some of the joints, and many of them are extremely stiff or choppy. It’s not clear at this point that this robot will actually be able to walk. According to Aldebaran, they will ship us 4 brand new robots in May.

Looking through the SDK documentation, the only way to compile a controller module to actually run on the Nao is going to be on Linux.

All in all, it’s been pretty disappointing. On the Aibo most of this stuff was pretty rock solid, even though OPEN-R was difficult interface to program. Tonight we will try to find out the Nao’s IP address and ssh into it, and see where we go from there.

The only progress we have made is in compiling one of the SDK examples, and having it bind with an instance of the Naoqi running on the mac.

On the upside, the docs show that we will have access to their motion engine, which is ZMP based, and whose parameters we can set.

The Nao is finally here!!

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hwork
on April 11, 2008
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IMG_1290, originally uploaded by northern_bites.

Our first Nao came today. We are currently looking through the documentation and waiting for the battery to charge. We will post more video and other updates once we figure out how to turn it on :).
Check out the flickr set with the unboxing pics.

Our first Nao is on the FedEx truck for delivery!

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Joho
on April 11, 2008
in Asides and Nao
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After an announcement yesterday that Aldebaran finally sent the first of our Nao, we got a tracking number this morning which shows the yet unnamed robot’s journey through Paris, Newark and then finally Portland. This morning at 7 am it was put on a truck for delivery, so it should make here by tonight! Stay tuned for unboxing pics and more coverage.

Quadruped robot walks 5.6 miles

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ndunn2
on April 8, 2008
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See here:

Not quite bipedal, but pretty cool. In particular the article notes that

The event … was to show off the machine’s energy efficiency. Unlike other walking robots that use motors to control every movement, the Ranger emulates human walking, using gravity to help swing its legs forward.

Standing still, the robot looks a bit like a tall sawhorse; walking, it suggests a human on crutches, alternately swinging forward two outside legs and then two inside ones. There are no knees, but at the ends of the legs are feet that can be tipped up and down, so that the robot pushes off with its toes, then tilts its feet upward to land on the heels as it brings its legs forward.

Robotstadium: Online Nao simulation league

Published
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Joho
on April 8, 2008
in Competition, RoboCup and Simulation
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Gostai, Cyberotics and Aldebaran have announced Robostadium, which is an online simmulation league based on the rules for the Nao SPL . The league is open to anyone, and the winner gets a free Nao and a software pack with URBI and Webots PRO. I think this will be really cool, since it could draw a ton of outside interest to our league.

I’d heard about this idea a while ago, and I was worried that only the established RoboCup teams would have a fighting chance, since walking is so difficult, but now I think there won’t be any or at least very few RoboCup teams participating:

The competitors will have to program a team of 4 Nao robots using the URBI middleware and the Java programming language.

Since most teams have considerable code infrastructure of their own in laguages like C++, and Python, porting this code to Java and learning a proprietary language like URBI is going to be a huge barrier to entry. (Especially considering that Nao teams already have a ton of work on their plates getting a new code base running). I’d have loved to participate, and we probably would have had a decent shot at winning the prize, but the potential reward isn’t really only worth it since code on the actual Nao can’t interoperate easily with the code in the Webots competition. (Since the Gyros aren’t simulated in Webots anyway, having a good walk engine in the simulator would have been difficult regardless of the requirement to use URBI.)

From a business side, this move to make it more difficult for RoboCup teams to enter is probably smart. Alderbaran is already getting money from all the RoboCup teams, so broadening their markets is probably a good thing. (i.e. It would be discouraging for new comers to get beat by all the RoboCup teams who have been doing this for longer.) Also, it hardly makes sense for Gostai to support behavioral scripting in Python or other languages like C++ (with can run a Python interpreter), since Gostai makes a living off people using their product to exactly those things.

I’m also interested to see how the rules and refereeing is going to work in the online simulation. The current world is pretty good, but out-of-bounds detection needs some work, and there is no replacement for a game-controller, as of yet. Without human-refereeing, it could become really tricky to assign pushing penalties, obstruction penalties, and most importantly ban goals scored from the center circle.