Northern Bites Blog

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.

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!

So here are the 24 applicants trying to get Nao’d:

1. BabyTigers DASH
2. BreDoBrothers
3. Cerberus
4. CMU-GT
5. Eagle Knights
6. Humboldt Berlin
7. Isfahan
8. Kouretes
9. Mi-PAL
10. Northern Bites
11. NUbots
12. NUIM
13. rUNSWift
14. RWTH-TUG-UCT
15. sharPKUngfu
16. SpelBots
17. SPQR
18. TeamChaos
19. TecRams
20. TJArk
21. UChile
22. UT Austin Villa
23. UWarriors
24. WrightEagle

And here are my notes:

• BreDo Brothers == Bremen (Thomas Rofer) + Dortmund (Walter and Matthias). They both did Humanoid teams last year, giving them a big leg up.
• CMU-GT == Carnegie Mellon + Georgia Tech. Should be interesting.
• Humboldt Berlin. Interesting that they’re in it. I heard they were going to just do the Humanoid League this year. Certainly, a standard platform is more attractive than doing hardware, to an Aibo team.
• NUbots. Again, another team I thought had jumped ship.
• rUNSWift. This is an awesome, old team that has won twice, consistently have finished high, and finished second in 2006. They didn’t compete this year, but it seems that they are back with the excitement of a new platform.
• RWTH-TUG-UCT. This is a German + Austrian + South African team. Potentially, the first RoboCup team from Africa. Also, they’ve got the World Cup in 2010, going to be held in South Africa, angle.

Now we’ve got to think regionally: two Mexican teams (Eagle Knights and TecRams), three Chinese teams (TJArk, WrightEagle, sharPKUngfu), four Aussie teams (Mi-PAL, NUbots, UNSW, UWarriors), and four US teams (CMU-GT, nBites, SpelBots, Austin). I’m thinking that the committee weighs regions. Teams that merge will have a lot better chance of getting in. It’ll be interesting to see what happens