Northern Bites Blog

That’s right, folks. RoboCup is in town this weekend, May 2-3, at the Watson Ice Arena on Bowdoin College campus. We’re also gracing the Bowdoin homepage right now (see above). Check out their article covering us and the event.

Also, in other great news, the US Open will be streamed live over the internet. Also, we’re going to be active on our Northern Bites twitter account as well: twitter.com/nbites.

Four fantastic RoboCup teams are competing in this year’s event, including Carnegie Mellon University, The University of Pennsylvania, and The University of Texas at Austin (and us).

So come out and support the Bites this weekend. There is no charge for admission. The schedule and rest of the information about the event can be found here.

After sitting in clearance delay for 2 weeks in French customs, our 4th Nao, Marvin, is finally back in the lab again. Now we have four working Naos, which is pretty lucky (knock on wood).

The team is reunited

Standing + no stiffness = really bad

We’ve posted some pictures of the venue on flickr (click through the image above). Some robot frames will be posted sometime soon for interested teams to look at (if you want to go through the trouble of reading our frame format).

Tomorrow we’ve got one more day of development before we pack up our things and head back to the lab.

We graphed the robots angle and angular speed with respect to the ground to decide how to determine when the robot is falling (in order to turn off the motors before impact). We ran 2 trials where the robot was purposefully pushed over, and two trials when the robot was walking (as a baseline).

Field construction in Watson Arena

We’re setting up in Watson Arena, and things look pretty good. With the lights on high, the field is 1500 Lux.
Walking works pretty well on the carpet as well.