It’s getting late on the Thursday before competition. So far Texas and UPenn have arrived, as well as Aldebaran (the company who builds the robots we use). Everything seems to be going smoothly so far.. Wifi hasn’t been acting up and our robots aren’t falling down too much. Our first game is tomorrow at 7:00pm vs UPenn, so needless to say we’re getting pretty excited! Tomorrow we should also be getting some extra manpower with the arrival of the beloved Northern Bums EJ and Octavian. To tide you over until the morning with some more updates, here’s a picture of three of our newbies in the classic pose: Program me like one of your French Robots!

The 2014 Robocup U.S. Open will be held this weekend in Watson Arena at Bowdoin. Participants so far include the University of Pennsylvania “UPennalizers,” the University of Texas at Austin “Austin Villa,” the University of Miami “RoboCanes,” and of course the Northern Bites. We’ve set up a website for the event with a tentative schedule and we hope to see you there!

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

Sorry, but the camera ran out of memory. We have some later footage that we’ll add some other time.

Video

Video

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).

Winning goal vs. Dutch Nao Team (watch for the nice obstacle avoidance).

goal

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