Brazil has been at center-stage for the past few weeks as the soccer (or futbol if you prefer) world cup has been played across the country. Well move over soccer, here comes ROBOCUP! The Northern Bites are going to Brazil baby!

Tonight is the last night the Northern Bites have in our summer residence. Tomorrow with the supervision of Chowndawgg we will be packing up the essentials and moving all of the rest of our gear to Searles Science Building. We’ve spent the summer sweltering in the old shoe-repair shop in Fort Andross getting our robots ready for competition. Over the past year the focus has been upon improving our behaviors and features such as kickoff plays, a shared ball and roleswitching have been implemented. It was fortunate that we were afforded an extra month of summer to work as compared to last year because we had big plans, and they’ve come together! On Thursday morning the team will be departing Brunswick for Boston with a final destination of Joao Pessoa in mind.

With the team this summer we have two seniors: Josh Imhoff and Daniel Zeller (captains); three juniors: Nikki Morin, Dan Navarro and Megan Maher (Newbies [though just barely]); and one bonus: Lizzie Mamantov (NorthernBum, Bowdoin class of 2013). Unfortunately due to reasons our coach and mentor Eric Chown (Chowndawgg) will not be able to join us.

We’re very excited about the competition, and hope to do right by our old teammates who brought us to the place we are today (EJ: don’t worry about calls from Josh about loc, international bills are out of our paygrade; we’ll be in touch to get your skype username! NOT A JOKE). We’ll be keeping everyone up-to-date here on the blog, but more information about the competition can be found on the official website, along with game scores, standings and (hopefully) livestreams.

Now it’s time for us to get back to bug squashing! Here’s the state of the lab right now:

ROLL!

P.S. Special thanks to Robocup friend Addie Brown who baked us some wonderful chocolate chip cookies to help us get through the long night ahead!

The Northern Bites were recently invited to the World Science Festival at NYU in NYC. We did some demoes and some hands-on activities with kids. It was a lot of fun. The crowds grew throughout the day until at the last demo of the day we actually ran into problems. Parents were fighting with parents over who should be where so that their kids could see the show. It got bad enough that the organizers had us stop the demo early because they were afraid for the safety of the kids up front. Sort of like being at a Who concert in the 1970s except with robots.

Nice article with some key quotes by Northern Bites friend/competitor Dan Lee here

A painful loss with squandered scoring chances and a second half bug that had some of our players thinking they were penalized when in fact Penn was being penalized.

Penn 1 Bowdoin 0

Here’s a blast from the past. An image of our first U.S. Open in 2005 in Atlanta. Greydon Foil (who wrote the entire code base) is in the foreground and Bowdoin alum Doug Vail is on the right (he was on the CMU team at this time). Things looked a little different back then.

Penn 3 Bowdoin 2

We finished off the weekend by defeating Texas 1-0 to finish in 3rd after losing a nail biter 1-0 to Penn in the semi-final. Penn ended up winning the championship with a win over Miami. The close scored show just how evenly matched the teams were. Ultimately Penn probably deserved to win because they had one area where they were clearly superior to the other teams – their motion kick was spectacular. As for us, we improved a lot over the weekend, identified areas for improvement, and should be one of the top teams going into Brazil.

We will be posting videos over the course of the next few days

The second round robin game of the U.S. Open has just finished with a Texas victory over Miami, 3-2. We’ll be updating results on the U.S. Open page throughout the rest of the games today and tomorrow.

Although we lost 2-3 against the University of Pennsylvania, we had a great game considering we had not played for over a year, and we could score two goals. We found some bugs that we will be working on throughout the weekend and the summer, in preparation for Brazil.
Here is a recording of one of our goals: