Northern Bites Blog

Apologies for the delay! Our Parent’s Weekend Scrimmage went off without a hitch (mostly). The lights were super dim and we had to enlist our auxiliary lighting to help out. Even so, the light was under 200, but Elise triumphed, churning out a functional color table in under 1.5 hours.

The team had a great showing, with 11 members participating. The new guys all got some experience with photo taking and the pre-game warm up. Photo taking this year is greatly expedited by the ability to stream and save images directly in the TOOL.

The scrimmage itself was a success. We played 2-on-1 for two regulation halves which ended in a 1-1 tie. The bots moved considerably slower than in Graz, but stayed stable for the whole game.

Check out the video below for the full match.
Parents Weekend 2009

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.

scrimamge-poster, originally uploaded by northern_bites.

Just a heads up that if you’re in the area, and you’d like to watch our team scrimmage, we are holding a public scrimmage this Sunday in Maine Lounge in Moulton Union. We will be playing the Aibos on the larger field, 5 on 5, and also have a small demonstration of our new Humanoid robots.

Public scrimmages are a great way for us to get off of our scaled down field in the lab, and onto the regulation sized pitch. Also it will allow us to setup our Nao field for the first time.

Directions here:

View Larger Map

As of today, we have addded 3 more students to our team; Seth, Yuna and Andy. The sophomores will spend the next couple weeks learning the ropes, and then aid us in our quest for world domination. The extra man power will be crucial once we start developement on two robot platforms at once (Aibo and Nao). The rest of us (George, Nick, Jeremy and I) are starting to get back into the swing of robocup. We’ve nailed down many planned improvements, and have set our sights on a repeat victory in China. Our first out-of-lab test match will be in early October, pitting our code from Atlanta against code from Hannover in Dagget lounge.

Where are the famed Northern Bites crew that took down the world for good ole’ America? How can I meet these people? — These are questions I get all the time.

First, there are members that are gone, but never far, from the Northern Bites lair. I, Henry Work, have stepped down from the captain position and am traveling cross-country as we speak with Mark Mcgranaghan to start a startup business. Jesse Butterfield, an ‘06er who was integral during the push last year, has just moved into his office @ Brown to do his masters/phd in Computer Science. His advisor is Chad who is awesome and does RoboCup-related things. Tucker Hermans ‘09, is now settled in Berlin for a year abroad. He might be doing Humanoid League stuff with them, or just working for the nBites from afar.

As for those carrying the nBites banner for the year, Nick Dunn is purportedly back and now has found his fire. Look for him to be huge if they change the thickness of the lines this year and remove the beacons. I got to see Jeremy Fishman, aka Lambchop, running around mumbling ‘python, python’. He’s going to be huge this year. George Slavov is back for another round, though I didn’t get to see him. RoboCup has been solved, but George needs to get cracking on bipedal walking. Chown-Dawg is most likely going to step up advising this year now that he’s on the Technical Committee. He also has a lot of publishing to do.

Lastly, Joho Strom ‘09 is taking over the captain duties this year. I have great confidence in Joho.

Roll, Northern Bites!