We bring you another podcast. First day of games, Naos play soccer (sort of). We had a larger crew talking tonight, so the levels aren’t wonderful. I may remaster it at a future point.
Whoops, first added this is a page and not a post…
Joho’s post from a little while ago about commits and code changes in SVN got me interested. So today when I came across a very cool and very extensive utility appropriately called StatSVN I immediately downloaded a copy of the code. Running it on the trunk took quite a bit of time and ultimately outputted over 480 html and png files, to make a nifty web page on my box. I’ve put some of the files up and I’ll be looking at maybe setting up some of the information for view here on the site.
Here was my favorite picture (with a close second going to the fact that our lowest amount of code change comes around lunch time).
LOC [Lines of Code] and Churn shows the usual LOC with the amount of code touched per day. Hopefully this should go decreasingly towards a release.
So I have just returned from the celebration of the great German Team leader Matthias’ thirtieth birthday. Many members of the Humboldt Aibo team were there, along with Humanoid team members. I learned a number of things about the future of RoboCup at Humboldt and the inner-workings of the Humanoid team.
Matthias also promises to have his wonderful videos from RoboCup 2007 posted online sometime within the next week.
I drove south for an hour last night to enjoy the company of some RoboCuppers. I met up with Todd Hester of Austin Villa as well as the RoboCup “celebrity” (so says an Australian newspaper) Michael Quinlan who took me to their robotics lab. There I was introduced to the (in)famous Mohan. After some segway play, we went out for burgers, drinks, and old fashioned nerd talk. I met some other members from the UT Comp Sci labs and even saw a man wearing a Koala backpack. It was a short trip to the city, as now I am back at home. I may even log some work hours for the trip, since discussion was had about the beginning of a collaborative research paper.
The semi-final went great. We now have officially documented proof of our goals against the NUBots. The final score was 10 to 3 NUBots, but the scores by half were 7 to 1 in the first and 3 to 2 in the second. At half-time we moved back our defender position and tried to make the goalie be a little more aggressive. That being said, the NUBots were seeing balls in our red player uniforms and were thus not playing as well. We are very confident that we will win the 3 – 4 game tomorrow.
The most exciting thing about this game is that we now have a keeper who stays in goal. Henry debugged the post distances which were being reported incorrectly and it had profound effects on the localization of the goalie. It also helped that we were using C3PO, an M3, because of Leo’s breakdown, the switch to 3PO helped definitely with positioning, but his vision and behaviors were not as fully tested on the ball and thus, although he blocked some balls he never attempted to clear them, something which made it very difficult to stop goals.
All in all we are looking loads better then our 8 to 0 loss to the German Team on opening day of the tourney.
Tonight we are packing up early and celebrating with a real dinner. Tomorrow we play Cerberus, a team we beat in the prelims and now with are improved code we hope to make our margin of victory much larger than the one we had in pool play.
We still have lots to work on, but being one of only three teams with a positive goal differential is a good feeling.
Northern Bites: 12 Harzer Rollers: 2
Changes from last night’s game included an updated color table, some behavioral improvements to ball chasing, and the removal of a significant bug that had been lingering in the vision system for over a year. With the vision bug corrected, localization for all players was improved and the keeper was staying closer to the center of the goal. Unfortunately he was still having problems and let in one goal after trying to clear it and then not finding the ball sitting next to him.
We entered half time with a lead of 4 to 1. After a couple goals by us in the second half, our goalie began to have troubles moving his leg and could not position himself back in the goal. At this point the Rollers had a strong head kick and a goal was scored. We called a time out to asses the problem, but could not use any of our back up robots, since we have not been able to get any of our M3 Aibo’s to work with the competition wireless LAN.
We replaced the keeper’s stick so that he would stand in goal and do nothing. This defense was effective in that our offense began to dominate, proving the old adage true that the best defense is an intimidating figure standing still and doing nothing. Maybe it’s a good offense. Even though we had a few problems with wireless lag the robots began shooting on goal with much more authority.
We play the NuBots in the semis at 6:00. We played three halves against them last night being scored on at least eight times (Henry says eleven) and scoring two goals (one while the NuBots had taken a player of the field). At this point we don’t have any proof of the goal against the NuBots, but we will on the video after tonight’s game when we beat them soundly.
We’ll post again after the semi’s.
We had a great end to round robin play. After an afternoon of debugging, variable tweaking, and constant testing, we polished our team to play at their highest level of play at the tournament.
We had improved grabbing and roll switching from the earlier game today and although the goalie was still having problems localizing, he was looking better. With the win we secured the second place seed for bracket B and we will be playing in the quarterfinals tomorrow at 2:00 against Harzer Roller.
Tomorrow should be exciting and we have high hopes of moving on from the quarters to play the NUBots in the semifinals. A scoreboard of all the games can be found here.
The Northern Bites pool play at the German Open got off to a disapointing start. In the first game of pool play for pool B we were defeated 8 – 0 by the German Team. Although the goal differential was quite high, play, particularly in the second half, was even at many times. The German team’s largest advantage came from the goalkeepers on the field. Our goalie was having a difficult time localizing and was positioning poorly in the goal; in opposition, the German Team goalie played very well and blocked multiple Northern Bites shots. Our second game will be this afternoon and we hope for a much better result.
We arrived safely, we arrived tired, we arrived in a country were beer is king and robots are more king. We are embedded in the very center of sprawling industrial fair in Hanover. We are now in our second day of testing and our players are looking strong. Last night in a test scrimmage against the German Team and ended after one half with a tie of 1-1. Setup continues today with scheduled test matches. Our team played well against Cerberus in our first test match of the day, even though wireless was spotty and are players’ decision making was not at the best level. We have another test scrimmage this afternoon and hope to see our dogs once again in the best of states. Pool play begins tomorrow and we will make sure to post all information about our triumphs and place many sad emoticons around information of our losses.