We are proud to be hosting the US OPEN for the Standard Platform League this year. The event will be held in Bowdoin’s brand-new Watson hockey arena on May 2nd and 3rd. Currently we expect attendance from all the US Teams: CMU, UPenn, UT Austin and of course the Northern Bites.
We are excited to be the first non-hockey or athletics related event host in this venue. The venue has great lighting, a superb sound system, and also the built-in capability to do webcasting. We expect the venue to be open to the public from 9 to 5 both Saturday and Sunday. The finals will be held Sunday afternoon.
Archive for the 'Competition' Category
On the bus to Suzhou from the Shanghai airport, Jack and I started writing what is the fastest behavior ever written – it was created today (Sunday) and will play soccer by Wednesday (knock on wood). Even in 2006, our behavioral code was started at least 2 weeks before competition. It will certainly be an adventure!
Our trip to get here went about as smooth as can be expected. No one got any sleep before our 3:00am meet up time in the Lab, and the 45-min taxi ride in a Lincoln Navigator turned out not be as cramped as we expected, considering the enormous size of our robot cases.
In Portland, Jack and I managed to get away with paying only 80 dollars apiece for our overweight and oversize luggage that could have cost us upto $300 per leg. What a steal! (Mike and Todd had to pay $360, and they’re luggage didn’t even make it to Shanghai on the right flight!) Our 1hr layover in Atlanta turned out to be plently long enough to make it from C55 (where our flight arrived) all the way to the E concourse to catch our 777 to shanghai. Bowdoin RoboCup represented in row 50, while the rest of the plane was pretty empty. The 15hr flight turned out to be just as long as you’d expect a 15 hour flight to be – long enough to take several hour long naps, watch a movie or two, and read some of my book, and still have time to watch the plane inch slowly across the map view in the headrest in front of me.
Once we got to Shanghai, I tried to take money from an ATM, but it said my Bank refused the payment. Instead I found a pretty decent exchange rate right next to the luggage pickup where you pay a flat 59 RMB commission on the exchange – the rate was something like 6.75 RMB/dollar. Once we got our luggage, we were met by some local volunteers who helped us sort out our ATA Carnet, and get through customs. Mainly we had to wait a long time for them to process CMUs Carnet – they never even looked through our luggage, and approved our paperwork quickly. As should be expected with technology, neither of the two cellphones I brought worked when I turned them on. The Bowdoin one refused to acquire any service – maybe it doesn’t work on the 900Mhz band? The other one I managed to borrow from Dave probably needs to get some minutes charged into it – it says Emergency Use Only – at least it gets service!
Exiting from Customs in Terminal 1, we met the rest of the group, who had already been informed by another volunteer that we had another team member waiting in Terminal 2. One of them even helped guide us to the other terminal, which was a relief. In Terminal 2, we met up with Todd and Mike from UT Austin, whose robot’s unfortunately hadn’t made it on the same flight. After grabbing Tucker and Henry, we were again guided to the tour bus, which took about 3 hours or so, and finally dropped off at our hotel. A deluge of volunteers processed all the RoboCuppers on the Bus, and got us meal tickets and room keys. Tomorrow we will start breakfast at 6am, in time to be at the Venue for the 7am opening.
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.
Today the Aibo technical comittee announced a portion of the updated rules for Robocup 2008. The size of the field will be increased by 25% in each dimension, to 5m by 7.5m. This represents an extra 50% of field area! To help take advantage of the new field size, teams will now consist of 5, instead of 4 robots per field. This will be a great opertunity to increase the high level soccer strategy of our team. Since the field is getting larger, the comittee has also hinted that the field lines will get wider to aid in line recognition. The official rules have yet to be published, so we’ll post the details then. The comittee has also called for qualification documents for entry to the Nao league. Presumably our paper will be mostly about why our success in the Aibo league will transfer to success in the Nao league.
Northern Bites: 8 Cerebus: 3
Wasn’t by far our best game, but wasn’t bad either. We got some good goals and were aided by a sometimes crashing opponent goalie. And our goalie looked pretty solid the whole game too, making two big saves, but missing a few hard shots from outside the box. We’re really amped to get back in the lab and start making things better for Atlanta. Our color table looked crappy in the second half — we weren’t grabbing at all.
As Tucker just said, he liked how the GermanTeam came over and said ’so you fixed your goalie?’. That’s sweet.
Roll, nBites!
Northern Bites: 12 Harzer Rollers: 2
Changes from last night’s game included an updated color table, some behavioral improvements to ball chasing, and the removal of a significant bug that had been lingering in the vision system for over a year. With the vision bug corrected, localization for all players was improved and the keeper was staying closer to the center of the goal. Unfortunately he was still having problems and let in one goal after trying to clear it and then not finding the ball sitting next to him.
We entered half time with a lead of 4 to 1. After a couple goals by us in the second half, our goalie began to have troubles moving his leg and could not position himself back in the goal. At this point the Rollers had a strong head kick and a goal was scored. We called a time out to asses the problem, but could not use any of our back up robots, since we have not been able to get any of our M3 Aibo’s to work with the competition wireless LAN.
We replaced the keeper’s stick so that he would stand in goal and do nothing. This defense was effective in that our offense began to dominate, proving the old adage true that the best defense is an intimidating figure standing still and doing nothing. Maybe it’s a good offense. Even though we had a few problems with wireless lag the robots began shooting on goal with much more authority.
We play the NuBots in the semis at 6:00. We played three halves against them last night being scored on at least eight times (Henry says eleven) and scoring two goals (one while the NuBots had taken a player of the field). At this point we don’t have any proof of the goal against the NuBots, but we will on the video after tonight’s game when we beat them soundly.
We’ll post again after the semi’s.
The Northern Bites pool play at the German Open got off to a disapointing start. In the first game of pool play for pool B we were defeated 8 – 0 by the German Team. Although the goal differential was quite high, play, particularly in the second half, was even at many times. The German team’s largest advantage came from the goalkeepers on the field. Our goalie was having a difficult time localizing and was positioning poorly in the goal; in opposition, the German Team goalie played very well and blocked multiple Northern Bites shots. Our second game will be this afternoon and we hope for a much better result.
We arrived safely, we arrived tired, we arrived in a country were beer is king and robots are more king. We are embedded in the very center of sprawling industrial fair in Hanover. We are now in our second day of testing and our players are looking strong. Last night in a test scrimmage against the German Team and ended after one half with a tie of 1-1. Setup continues today with scheduled test matches. Our team played well against Cerberus in our first test match of the day, even though wireless was spotty and are players’ decision making was not at the best level. We have another test scrimmage this afternoon and hope to see our dogs once again in the best of states. Pool play begins tomorrow and we will make sure to post all information about our triumphs and place many sad emoticons around information of our losses.
More than 70 Teams from over 13 Countries. And we’re one of them.
Plus two teams I’ve never heard of before, one old, one new: Harzer Rollers and The Cat.
PCAR 2006 is a ‘International Symposium on Practical Cognitive Agents and Robots’ that was held very recently in Perth, Australia.
One of the invited speakers was 4-Legged League Technical Committe Advisory Member Masahiro Fujita, who also happens to be the literal god of the Sony robots Aibo and Qrio.
Our good friend Michael Quinlan and his NUBot teammates presented a paper entitled ‘Impact of Tactical Variations in the RoboCup Four-Legged League’. Also, Kai Xu, a new technical committee member this year for the 4-Legged league and captain of China’s WrightEagle, went and presented ‘Legged Robot Gait Locus Generation Based on Genetic Algorithms’. Both papers sound interesting and I’d love to get a copy of them.
To top it off, they held an ‘exhibition’ of 4-Legged teams squaring off against each other. Sadly, the reigning champion NUBots did not participate but WrightEagle, UTS Unleashed, and a new team from Australia, the UWArriors from the University of of Western Australia. If someone who attended should stumble upon this page, please let us know how the exhibition went. It’s never too early to start scouting for RoboCup 2007.