Just a quick update – we are in fact alive. Sorry for the lack of posts recently. The semester has started and the team is beginning to pick up steam again. We had a presence at the Student Activities Fair which presents first years with many of the extracurricular activities available at Bowdoin. We are planning on visiting some of the beginning to intermediate computer science courses to drum up some interest, as well as having an informational meeting this Sunday at 9 PM.

Many of the senior members of the Northern Bites are working on Honor’s Projects this semester. Areas being researched include bipedal walking, robots that learn to see better through human training, figuring out where on the field a robot is based on the position of his opponents, and distributed computing and its relation to machine learning.

We are working with a new version control system this year called git; we just had a seminar on its usage last night. We hope that it will help us in situations where internet access is spotty, such as at all the major RoboCup competitions we have attended thus far.

RoboCup 2008

Excellent video. Shades of Wall-E in there.

Aibo:
Third place game
Semifinals
Quarterfinals

NBites vs Cerberus pool play
NBites vs TJArk pool play
NBites vs SharPKUngfu pool play
NBites vs UTAustin pool play
NBites vs WrightEagle Unsleashed! scrimmage
GermanTeam vs WrightEagle Unleashed!

Teaser

Nao:
NBites vs UTAustin
NBites vs Zadeat
NBites vs UTAustin

** edit **
I updated the links to refer through our public media repository

The three of us going back to Bowdoin just made it in after 31 straight hours of travel. Now that I’m back on campus with reliable internet and access to iMovieHD I will do my best to get footage off the DV tapes and edited before I leave in a day or two. Cross your fingers.

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.