First half.
Archive
The Northern Bites are on a roll, recently defeating UChile Kiltros 3:0, making us the winner of our pool, and pitting us against NTU Robot Pal (Taiwan) tomorrow at noon local time.
Maybe the increase in goals is due to support from our visitor from home!
Banner brought by Mrs. Krob!
In our fourth game here in Austria, the Northern Bites managed to break our two goal per game streak and score 3 goals against TJArk (China). This, paired with our win from yesterday against the Nao Devils, qualifies us for the quarterfinals round!
Marvin in his "squat-goalie" position"
We have one more game in this round of play against UChile Kiltros at 2:05pm local time (8:05am EST). The schedule and updated scores can be found here: http://www.robocup2009.org/150-0-schedule
I’ve uploaded an 800MB version of our Nao Devils game from Chown’s HD camera. If anyone knows how to get this to stream straight to the browser, let me know:
This year there are 24 teams at robocup, and four fields. Needless to say, there are many people looking to use the fields for testing between matches. However, some (nearly ALL) teams, who will remain nameless, have adopted a ‘camping’ attitude to testing. While it may seem convenient to park your laptop and a few friends on the carpet, it is disadvantageous to everyone, since no one is able to test on in proper game like environment.
The proper way to test on the field is to never leave anything but active robots and standing humans.
In our first match in the second round of pool play, we beat the Dortmund Nao Devils 2-0 in an exciting match. The Nao Devils were the first team we’ve played that had a moving goalie, and players which were quick to the ball. As I mentioned before, the Nao Devils have the fastest walk in the league, clocking in at 25 cm/s. Our walk currently maxes out at 10 cm/s. Despite this speed differential, our robots superior ball handling in close quarters and some goalie troubles on the opponent team lead us to score one goal in each half. In all, we had at least four really good chances to score, but narrowly pushed the ball out twice.
Tomorrow, we will play two as of yet unknown teams at 10:55 and 13:55 local time. Our opponents will be determined in penalty kicks tonight, as both their deciding intermediate rounds ended in 0-0 ties.
After two wins today, the Northern Bites will advance to the second round of pool play:
Northern Bites vs. Eagle Knights: 2-0
HTWK Leipzig vs Northern Bites: 0-2
After finally receiving back 2 more robots from the shop late last night,
we scored our first EVER goal in Nao regulation matches in our game against Eagle Knights, a veteran team from Mexico. We sealed our passage into the round of sixteen with a 2-0 closeout against the second place team from the German OPEN, the Nao-Team HTWK, from Leipzig. HTWK was plagued with technical issues, and only had functioning robots for part of the match.
In the next round, we will likely face the Nao Devils, a veteran team from Dortmund. That match will be Thursday at 13:55, local time. The top two teams from the next round will advance to the quarter finals.
A frequently updated score sheet can be found here
We finally got back our first robot from the Nao technicians. He had a broken arm and fried circuits. We are still waiting for three more robots to get fixed — two broken necks and a worn out hip.
This RoboCup has affirmed my belief that having lots of robots is crucial to having a successful team. With the Aibos, we had 12, now we only have 4.
In other news, our test scrimmage today was promising, (except that we were using all loaner robots which couldn’t kick). Tomorrow we’re looking forward to playing real games.
Marvin back from the shop
The Northern Bites will be playing in Pool B, Field A against Eagle Knights, from Mexico and Nao-Team HTWK, from Leipzig. Our first match is Wed. July 1st at Noon, against Eagle Knights. The second is at 3pm against HTWK on the same day. All times are Austrian times (+6 hours from East coast, and +9 from the West coast).
The full listing for placements for all the teams can be found here