Sorry for the late blog entry, we were all a bit beat last night and I didn’t have internet access in my room.

We purchased fans from a local store in order to beat the heat in the venue, and it made things unbelievably nicer and more comfortable.

We spent some time yesterday getting more pictures of the second field; fortunately both fields look relatively uniform in terms of lighting.

We attended a symposium talk towards dinner time that was about human and robot interaction. The speaker posited that not only do humans need more sensory feedback from robots (e.g. tactility or haptics), but that robots need more bio-data from humans (e.g. heart rate, blood pressure, impedance of the skin) in order to know when we’re stressed or physiologically abnormal. For instance, in a virtual reality program, things might appear bright red for hot and blue for cold; to a color blind person this would not be meaningful information. If the system knew about that physical limitation, it could tailor its representation of the temperature using a means other than color. A lot of the things he talked about were very far into the future, but he provided a nice overview of man/robot interactions in the past.

After dinner we had a test Aibo scrimmage against Wright Eagle. If you remember, Wright Eagle was the one team that beat us last year. Unfortunately they beat us once again last night, 3-0. Video of the scrimmage to come. A lot of the problems we think stem from trying to save our game robots and use alternates instead.

— Today

We had our first Aibo match against Cerberus which we won 5-0 6-0. However, they had major wireless issues (which is often the case at Robocup we’ve found) so the level of play was not quite up to what it would have been had the wireless worked.

We had our first Nao match against UT-Austin which resulted in a draw, 0-0. As of writing, all games have ended the same way, with no goals. The refs have to be babysitters to ensure the robots don’t totter over and break themselves, which nevertheless happened a few times.

I only have reliable internet access here at the hotel, but I will try to get the videos up as soon as possible.