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

Tomorrow morning at 11am, the Northern Bites will be holding an exhibition for the community in Morrell Lounge (in Smith Union). We’ll be playing some two-on-two or two-on-one from 11 until noon. We’ll be filming, so look for a post on that later.

I finalized several days ago an ant build script for the TOOL (Totally Operating Omniuseful Linesofcodehackedtogether) and it’ll be pushed into the nbites master soon. It is somewhat faster than make, the code is cleaner, it’s more easily extensible and automatically adds jars to the path, but the best thing is probably that you can just import the ant build file in an IDE to import tool (which will hopefuly encourage more rookies to juggle with the code). All you have to do is run the command

ant

Of course, as any part of the tool, it’s imperfect since it still relies on make to make the TOOLVisionLink library (which is acceptable since you only do it once).

Cheers,

Octavian

Well, it’s a new year for the Northern Bites and we’re gaining momentum. We’ve got a 5-man CS 320 Robotics course led by the fearless Chown-dog himself, 4 newly involved frosh and 2 new sophomores. Add in a brand new MacBook and we’ve got ourselves a team.

On the near horizon, we’ll be having a Parent’s Weekend scrimmage in Smith Union. It’ll be a great chance to showcase our MASSIVE improvements since the last home game (US Open ‘09) and a perfect time to give the rookies a sense of how the games actually go.

(Un)Roll!!!

Eagle Knights
Nao-Team HTWK

In Hi-Def.

Hi-Def, not including shootout

B Human 5 – Bowdoin 0

High Def. Lower Res coming later.

Semi-finals vs. Nao Devils

Much more to come tomorrow.

The Northern Bites played a nearly flawless first half against B-Human, starting half time with only one goal scored against us. The field was packed with spectators who were crowding the bleachers and standing on tables. B-Human, the favorites to win the match, had scored at least 7 points in every match during the tournament. To combat this legendary opponent, we pulled out some ballzy, never before seen or game-tested dribbling code which wowed onlookers.

In the second half, this gamble went awry, resulting in some technical difficulties with our robots. Our goalie, which made some amazing saves in the first half overheated under the battery of shots in the second half, and fell limp to the ground, letting in four goals. The final score was 0-5 for B-Human. This was the lowest scoring match B-Human played, which prior to the finals scored between 7 and 11 goals in each of their matches.

More pictures and stats after the break:
Continue reading ‘Northern Bites Places Second at RoboCup 2009 Graz’

Aldebaran, the French robot company who builds the Nao, likes to do half-times shows demonstrating the capabilities of the robot.  They have had tai chi routines, acted out scenes from plays, and have added a new dance routine to their repertoire – a tribute to Michael Jackson.  Here is a shot of the robot mid “Billie Jean:”