The Northern Bites played a nearly flawless first half against B-Human, starting half time with only one goal scored against us. The field was packed with spectators who were crowding the bleachers and standing on tables. B-Human, the favorites to win the match, had scored at least 7 points in every match during the tournament. To combat this legendary opponent, we pulled out some ballzy, never before seen or game-tested dribbling code which wowed onlookers.

In the second half, this gamble went awry, resulting in some technical difficulties with our robots. Our goalie, which made some amazing saves in the first half overheated under the battery of shots in the second half, and fell limp to the ground, letting in four goals. The final score was 0-5 for B-Human. This was the lowest scoring match B-Human played, which prior to the finals scored between 7 and 11 goals in each of their matches.

More pictures and stats after the break:
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I’ve uploaded an 800MB version of our Nao Devils game from Chown’s HD camera. If anyone knows how to get this to stream straight to the browser, let me know:

Northern Bites vs Nao Devils Second Round of Pool Play 2009

In our first match in the second round of pool play, we beat the Dortmund Nao Devils 2-0 in an exciting match. The Nao Devils were the first team we’ve played that had a moving goalie, and players which were quick to the ball. As I mentioned before, the Nao Devils have the fastest walk in the league, clocking in at 25 cm/s. Our walk currently maxes out at 10 cm/s. Despite this speed differential, our robots superior ball handling in close quarters and some goalie troubles on the opponent team lead us to score one goal in each half. In all, we had at least four really good chances to score, but narrowly pushed the ball out twice.

Tomorrow, we will play two as of yet unknown teams at 10:55 and 13:55 local time. Our opponents will be determined in penalty kicks tonight, as both their deciding intermediate rounds ended in 0-0 ties.

After two wins today, the Northern Bites will advance to the second round of pool play:

Northern Bites vs. Eagle Knights: 2-0

HTWK Leipzig vs Northern Bites: 0-2

After finally receiving back 2 more robots from the shop late last night,
we scored our first EVER goal in Nao regulation matches in our game against Eagle Knights, a veteran team from Mexico. We sealed our passage into the round of sixteen with a 2-0 closeout against the second place team from the German OPEN, the Nao-Team HTWK, from Leipzig. HTWK was plagued with technical issues, and only had functioning robots for part of the match.

In the next round, we will likely face the Nao Devils, a veteran team from Dortmund. That match will be Thursday at 13:55, local time. The top two teams from the next round will advance to the quarter finals.

A frequently updated score sheet can be found here

We finally got back our first robot from the Nao technicians. He had a broken arm and fried circuits. We are still waiting for three more robots to get fixed — two broken necks and a worn out hip.
This RoboCup has affirmed my belief that having lots of robots is crucial to having a successful team. With the Aibos, we had 12, now we only have 4.

In other news, our test scrimmage today was promising, (except that we were using all loaner robots which couldn’t kick). Tomorrow we’re looking forward to playing real games.

The Northern Bites will be playing in Pool B, Field A against Eagle Knights, from Mexico and Nao-Team HTWK, from Leipzig. Our first match is Wed. July 1st at Noon, against Eagle Knights. The second is at 3pm against HTWK on the same day. All times are Austrian times (+6 hours from East coast, and +9 from the West coast).

The full listing for placements for all the teams can be found here

Andrew, Elise, Jack and I have successfully arrived in Graz, and checked into our hotel with relatively few hiccups. The madness starts tomorrow at 8 am when we will try to register at the venue. Tonight, we will try to beat the jet lag, and see if we can’t stabilize the walk some more. Tucker will join us tomorrow, and Prof. Chown on Tuesday. We’ll try to post some pictures of the venue tomorrow.

Spring Summer Training has been rough on our robots. As we prepare to leave today for Austria, all of our robots are broken in some way, and only one is usable for soccer. Two have snapped necks, Marvin has his arm in a sling, and Trillian tore her hip-flexor. We should be getting them fixed in Austria, but the wait times might be long with so many other teams in a similar state as us. Hopefully next year will bring with it a new fleet of robot reinforcements (* hint-hint barry mills *). Checkout the current team picture below: