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.

The team just received the email today–The Northern Bites has been accepted into RoboCup 2009, to be held in Graz, Austria this coming summer. The nBites will be celebrating its fifth year of competition this year, as well as its fourth entry into the RoboCup World Championships. Here is the list of accepted teams (25):

- ASURA-FIT, Fukuoka IT (Japan)
- Austin Villa, UT Austin (USA)
- B-Human, DFKI & Uni. Bremen (Germany)
- BURST, Bar Ilan University (Israel)
- Cerberus, Bo?aziçi University (Turkey)
- CMU/Wright Eagle, Carnegie Mellon Uni. (USA), Uni. of Science & Technology (China)
- Eagle Knights, ITAM (Mexico)
- Kouretes, TU Crete (Greece)
- Kshitij, IIIT Hyderabad (India)
- Les Trois Mousquetaires, Uni. Versailles, Uni. of Paris XI, ES EFREI (France)
- Maynooth, National University of Ireland Maynooth (Ireland)
- MRL, Azad University of Qazvin (Iran)
- NAO-Team Humboldt, Humboldt University Berlin (Germany)
- Northern Bites, Bowdoin College (USA)
- NTU Robot PAL, National Taiwan University, Taiwan
- NUManoids, University of Newcastle (Australia)
- rUNSWift, UNSW (Australia)
- SPQR, Sapienza Università di Roma (Italy)
- Team Chaos, Uni. of Murcia & Carlos III Uni. (Spain)
- Team Dortmund, University of Dortmund (Germany)
- TJArk, Tongji University (China)
- UChile, Universidad de Chile (Chile)
- UPennalizers, University of Pennsylvania (USA)
- Vienna, Vienna Uni. of Tech. & Uni. of App. Sci. Tech. Vienna (Austria)
- Zadeat, RWTH Aachen (Germany), TU Graz (Austria), Uni. of Cape Town (South Africa)

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.

The title says all. More to come.

Northern Bites 2 – Austin Villa 1. Although neither side appeared to have its best stuff, the Northern Bites victory demonstrated the continuing success of its team effort. This marks the Northern Bites third US Open (this event didn’t occur last year), and their first win. Hopefully video and pictures to follow.

Stuck on the west coast while the nBiters are trying to win our first ever US Open championship, I’m looking around for scores and can’t find any. So I called the team up and put them up the hard way. Here are the scores from Sunday, May 25 2008:

10:30 am CMDash’08 (Carnegie Mellon University) vs Metrobots (Brooklyn College): 8-0.

11:30 am Austin Villa (University of Texas at Austin) vs Brown # (Brown University): Forfeit by Brown, apparently their trunk is messed up currently.

12:30 pm Northern Bites (Bowdoin College) vs Metrobots (Brooklyn College): 9-0, see this post for more.

2:30 pm Brown # (Brown University) vs CMDash’08 (Carnegie Mellon University): Forfeit again by the Brown #.

4:30 pm Northern Bites (Bowdoin College) vs Austin Villa (University of Texas at Austin): UPDATE:: 2-1 at halftime. We’re apparently having issues seeing the beacons. The NUbots scored first (we’re calling them the NUbots from now on). UPDATE x2:: 3-1 after a lighting situation forced the half to restart a few minutes in. Our goalie having some issues, but the positioning looked good. UPDATE x3:: 3-2 Final Score after a series of crappy plays by us. Still a win, and not one that will make our team rest on its laurels.

In lieu of the 2:30pm game, there was a test match put on by CMU and UT. Apparently a fairly close game, UT won by four or so points (no official score was taken).

The nBiters say that they’ll have video of the 12:30pm and 4:30pm game up when they retreat to the hotel tonight. Apparently the internet at the hotel is better than the internet at CMU. Go figure.

Also to note that at 1:30pm and 3:30pm the various Nao teams (us, CMU/GT, Austin Villa), are giving Nao demonstrations to the adoring public. The nBites crew had a cool demo prepared with the two robots, one which made a movement while the other mimic’d that movement (through wireless communication, not vision if I understand correctly). However, as I’ve heard happens when you breathe upon them with a foul temperament, the Naos broke right before the demo. Hopefully having Aldebaran Robotics representatives from France will get things moving in the right direction as RoboCup hits peak season pre-China.

UPDATE:: I just had to this great idea that they should stream the video over the internet, using their MacBooks and ustream so that Tucker, my mom, and I (the Northern Bites fan club) could watch the game without delay. However, CMU is making them walk like a 1/2 mile to get on the internet. What crap!

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.