Stuck on the west coast while the nBiters are trying to win our first ever US Open championship, I’m looking around for scores and can’t find any. So I called the team up and put them up the hard way. Here are the scores from Sunday, May 25 2008:

10:30 am CMDash’08 (Carnegie Mellon University) vs Metrobots (Brooklyn College): 8-0.

11:30 am Austin Villa (University of Texas at Austin) vs Brown # (Brown University): Forfeit by Brown, apparently their trunk is messed up currently.

12:30 pm Northern Bites (Bowdoin College) vs Metrobots (Brooklyn College): 9-0, see this post for more.

2:30 pm Brown # (Brown University) vs CMDash’08 (Carnegie Mellon University): Forfeit again by the Brown #.

4:30 pm Northern Bites (Bowdoin College) vs Austin Villa (University of Texas at Austin): UPDATE:: 2-1 at halftime. We’re apparently having issues seeing the beacons. The NUbots scored first (we’re calling them the NUbots from now on). UPDATE x2:: 3-1 after a lighting situation forced the half to restart a few minutes in. Our goalie having some issues, but the positioning looked good. UPDATE x3:: 3-2 Final Score after a series of crappy plays by us. Still a win, and not one that will make our team rest on its laurels.

In lieu of the 2:30pm game, there was a test match put on by CMU and UT. Apparently a fairly close game, UT won by four or so points (no official score was taken).

The nBiters say that they’ll have video of the 12:30pm and 4:30pm game up when they retreat to the hotel tonight. Apparently the internet at the hotel is better than the internet at CMU. Go figure.

Also to note that at 1:30pm and 3:30pm the various Nao teams (us, CMU/GT, Austin Villa), are giving Nao demonstrations to the adoring public. The nBites crew had a cool demo prepared with the two robots, one which made a movement while the other mimic’d that movement (through wireless communication, not vision if I understand correctly). However, as I’ve heard happens when you breathe upon them with a foul temperament, the Naos broke right before the demo. Hopefully having Aldebaran Robotics representatives from France will get things moving in the right direction as RoboCup hits peak season pre-China.

UPDATE:: I just had to this great idea that they should stream the video over the internet, using their MacBooks and ustream so that Tucker, my mom, and I (the Northern Bites fan club) could watch the game without delay. However, CMU is making them walk like a 1/2 mile to get on the internet. What crap!

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IMG_1290, originally uploaded by northern_bites.

Our first Nao came today. We are currently looking through the documentation and waiting for the battery to charge. We will post more video and other updates once we figure out how to turn it on :).
Check out the flickr set with the unboxing pics.

It took me hours and hours to find this bug today. The following code works (even though in my opinion it shouldn’t). The code is more pseudo- than real. The real thing wouldn’t be understandable anyway.


Matrix *m1 = (Matrix*)malloc(sizeof(Matrix));
free(m1);
useMatrix(m1);


The code did exactly what it was supposed to do even though I free up the memory in between the calls in a more complicated scenario. However, when I modified the code to this


Matrix *m1 = (Matrix*)malloc(sizeof(Matrix));
free(m1);
Matrix *m2 = (Matrix*)malloc(sizeof(Matrix));
useMatrix(m1);


I got a segfault and couldn’t figure out why creating a new object would cause my program to crash. In my opinion a more sensible scenario would be that the first code snippet would cause the program to segfault, so I knew that there was something wrong already.

Bizzare… The platform is OS X Leopard with gcc 4.0.1. The current theory is that even though I free the memory, the contents are still intact and the OS is able to use them, but once I malloc again, the same region of memory got overwritten and the old pointer was marked invalid. I don’t know…

Anyone who comes across this and has a good way of explaining this awful behavior to me, I would be happy to hear it.

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IMG_1196.jpg, originally uploaded by northern_bites.

The RoboCup 2008 site appears to be updated along with a new logo. And, more importantly, the schedule has been released. The dates will be July 14-20. This should give the nBites a strong advantage as they more time in the lab between the end of school and the start of RoboCup.

So here are the 24 applicants trying to get Nao’d:

1. BabyTigers DASH
2. BreDoBrothers
3. Cerberus
4. CMU-GT
5. Eagle Knights
6. Humboldt Berlin
7. Isfahan
8. Kouretes
9. Mi-PAL
10. Northern Bites
11. NUbots
12. NUIM
13. rUNSWift
14. RWTH-TUG-UCT
15. sharPKUngfu
16. SpelBots
17. SPQR
18. TeamChaos
19. TecRams
20. TJArk
21. UChile
22. UT Austin Villa
23. UWarriors
24. WrightEagle

And here are my notes:

• BreDo Brothers == Bremen (Thomas Rofer) + Dortmund (Walter and Matthias). They both did Humanoid teams last year, giving them a big leg up.
• CMU-GT == Carnegie Mellon + Georgia Tech. Should be interesting.
• Humboldt Berlin. Interesting that they’re in it. I heard they were going to just do the Humanoid League this year. Certainly, a standard platform is more attractive than doing hardware, to an Aibo team.
• NUbots. Again, another team I thought had jumped ship.
• rUNSWift. This is an awesome, old team that has won twice, consistently have finished high, and finished second in 2006. They didn’t compete this year, but it seems that they are back with the excitement of a new platform.
• RWTH-TUG-UCT. This is a German + Austrian + South African team. Potentially, the first RoboCup team from Africa. Also, they’ve got the World Cup in 2010, going to be held in South Africa, angle.

Now we’ve got to think regionally: two Mexican teams (Eagle Knights and TecRams), three Chinese teams (TJArk, WrightEagle, sharPKUngfu), four Aussie teams (Mi-PAL, NUbots, UNSW, UWarriors), and four US teams (CMU-GT, nBites, SpelBots, Austin). I’m thinking that the committee weighs regions. Teams that merge will have a lot better chance of getting in. It’ll be interesting to see what happens