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!

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!

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Bowdoin College President Barry Mills attended our game this morning. We want to thank him and the college for being so supportive and letting us use the beautiful new Watson Arena for our US Open.

That’s right, folks. RoboCup is in town this weekend, May 2-3, at the Watson Ice Arena on Bowdoin College campus. We’re also gracing the Bowdoin homepage right now (see above). Check out their article covering us and the event.

Also, in other great news, the US Open will be streamed live over the internet. Also, we’re going to be active on our Northern Bites twitter account as well: twitter.com/nbites.

Four fantastic RoboCup teams are competing in this year’s event, including Carnegie Mellon University, The University of Pennsylvania, and The University of Texas at Austin (and us).

So come out and support the Bites this weekend. There is no charge for admission. The schedule and rest of the information about the event can be found here.

We are proud to share with the world that we have achieved a new milestone in walking. Our very own motion engine was able to propel the robot forward for 20 or so centimeters without falling down. Joho and I are very excited about what lies ahead. We have all sorts of neat ideas about the future and where we would like to go.

Here’s a video of it on youtube: Our Nao walking

The team just received the email today–The Northern Bites has been accepted into RoboCup 2009, to be held in Graz, Austria this coming summer. The nBites will be celebrating its fifth year of competition this year, as well as its fourth entry into the RoboCup World Championships. Here is the list of accepted teams (25):

– ASURA-FIT, Fukuoka IT (Japan)
– Austin Villa, UT Austin (USA)
– B-Human, DFKI & Uni. Bremen (Germany)
– BURST, Bar Ilan University (Israel)
– Cerberus, Bo?aziçi University (Turkey)
– CMU/Wright Eagle, Carnegie Mellon Uni. (USA), Uni. of Science & Technology (China)
– Eagle Knights, ITAM (Mexico)
– Kouretes, TU Crete (Greece)
– Kshitij, IIIT Hyderabad (India)
– Les Trois Mousquetaires, Uni. Versailles, Uni. of Paris XI, ES EFREI (France)
– Maynooth, National University of Ireland Maynooth (Ireland)
– MRL, Azad University of Qazvin (Iran)
– NAO-Team Humboldt, Humboldt University Berlin (Germany)
– Northern Bites, Bowdoin College (USA)
– NTU Robot PAL, National Taiwan University, Taiwan
– NUManoids, University of Newcastle (Australia)
– rUNSWift, UNSW (Australia)
– SPQR, Sapienza Università di Roma (Italy)
– Team Chaos, Uni. of Murcia & Carlos III Uni. (Spain)
– Team Dortmund, University of Dortmund (Germany)
– TJArk, Tongji University (China)
– UChile, Universidad de Chile (Chile)
– UPennalizers, University of Pennsylvania (USA)
– Vienna, Vienna Uni. of Tech. & Uni. of App. Sci. Tech. Vienna (Austria)
– Zadeat, RWTH Aachen (Germany), TU Graz (Austria), Uni. of Cape Town (South Africa)

Beating the University of Texas at Austin, we have placed third at RoboCup in China. Four of us sped off the airport (carrying our robots) immediately after the game, while the rest were able to go on stage during the closing ceremony to receive our trophy. The ceremony was very impressive — complete with fireworks and an awesome trophy — outdoing Bremen in 2006 and dwarfing Atlanta in 2007.

This is the fifth trophy the nBites have won in two years, winning 3rd at German Open 2007, 1st at RoboCup 2007, 2nd at German Open 2008, 1st at US Open 2008, and 3rd at RoboCup 2008.

The title says all. More to come.