So that was a blowout. We played very badly. But they played very well. We are in the top 8, so that means an auto-qualification for next year should we choose to go. Very proud of us Northern Bites and a great year to go out on for the newest Northern Bums. Thanks to everyone for their support. We are going to get some sleep… Fina … zzz … zzz … zzzzzzz
The server that our blog is hosted on went down, so we apologize for the interruption. Lots of good news to report, though!
We won our first game this morning against Edinferno 1-0 using our new fairly static strategy.
After some minor improvements we went on to play RoboEireann. In the first half we scored one, that they quickly answered after our goalie tried heroically to clear the ball.
In the second half, we made a switch to make our defender slightly more aggressive and we had to take a timeout to write and install the code in time. We had a good drive and scored again to get up 2-1. Then as time was expiring, our opponent drove down the field and had the ball right in front of our goal, but the upgraded defender swept in and disrupted them just enough for the clock to run out and full time to be called.
With that, the Northern Bites have won out in the second round robin pool and will face Austin Villa from the University of Texas at Austin in the quarter finals tonight. A strong showing for the team and very happy to have done so well and come this far. We don’t expect to progress any further because the other teams are very very good. But we will give it our best shot.
Also here’s a video showing how intense our team is. The RoboCup organizers took this video and posted it on their Facebook page. Apparently we are hilarious.
RoboCup Emotions < — Link if the video doesn't load below (or refresh the page).
The queen consort of the Netherlands visited today, luckily she didn’t stay long enough for our game. We had two great drives down the field and took advantage of one in the second half. Much relief was felt on the team when the goal went in.
We had more wireless issues, but put in a new strategy two have two wing defenders that will only go after the ball if it is within a meter of them. They came in very handy when our striker, who had flipped her localization (attacking her own goal), drove down to our goal. Because there was no WiFi, our goalie couldn’t unflip our striker. But one defender passed to the other and then we cleared the ball out and saved a possible own goal. Didn’t see much from the goalie that game and hopefully we won’t have to. Looking to score more in the next games.
Hi everyone!
There is an unofficial poster contest happening in our league. The goal is to base a poster off of SPQR’s new design. Shown here:
Our entry, courtesy of Nick Edises ’13 is:
We will see how we do in that contest. Hopefully we aren’t distracted from the soccer.
We lost by 4. But we didn’t lose by 5, which means that we are moving on as the second place team in our pool. We play again at 2:20 local time tomorrow in the second round robin. Quote of the day: “I have never been so excited about losing” -EJ
We scored! And we won! Had the exact same situation as our near goal in the last game. But we scored this time! We had one player, plus the goalie the whole game to avoid any WiFi issues. There was also lots of kicking the ball out the endline so it gets placed back at midfield, dribbling it down the sideline, and kicking out the endline again. So we are going to try to close that loop and hopefully actually score more goals.
Next game at 6:00pm local time, 12:00 pm EDT and 9:00 am PDT. We play the Nao Devils from Dortmund who finished in the Quarter Finals last year. Should be a good game.
Our first game was a nil-nil tie. The first half was dominated by 10 second lags over the WiFi so teamwork pretty much fell apart.
As a result, for the second half we played with one field player and a goalie. We did much better, and got the ball down on the opponent goal line, but kicked it to the side out of the goal area because another robot spun us to the side.
Our next game is at 2:40 pm local time, 8:40 am EDT.
Here’s a link to the live stream. They hop around to lots of different fields so it might be tough to catch us, but they might show our games too. We will try to lure the camera man over.
We tied Penn 1-1… lots of comm failures on field D. Still not sure what caused our issues, but hope to have better results tomorrow. There were a few behavior bugs that cropped up, but it seemed to be mostly comm that was holding us back. Frustrating because there’s not much we can do to control that part.
First game tomorrow at 11:20 am local time!
Thought we’d write a quick status update today.
Localization is looking awesome! We seem to rarely lose track of where we are, so that is awesome for making quick decisions and generally looking intelligent. This was helped by lots of vision refinements and proper identification of corners.
Comm/WiFi is working… sort of. Field D, which we are playing our first round robin pool on, is closest to the other leagues and has the worst interference. So it might be hard to start playing, but should get easier as the competition goes on.
Goalie is making progress and is getting smarter by the hour.
Our approach to the ball looks great. We are orbiting better and not walking through the ball as much anymore.
We have a scrimmage at 8:30 local time, that’s 2:30pm EDT and 11:30 PDT (Hi Mom!).
More details to come after that . Stay tuned!