We lost our first game to Penn 1-2. Due to the goalie not having a charged battery at the beginning of both halves, Penn took advantage of an empty net to score twice. We scored once in the second half as well.
With a new battery plan, we are taking on Miami at 11. Tune into the live stream to check it out!
Check out http://robocup2013.webs.com/ to find out what’s going on this weekend
The field has been flattened and the lines have gone on. Now we can start prepping for the US Open this coming weekend. This years field is essentially two of last year’s put next to each other. That’s a lot of new things for our robots to see.
Today marked the beginning of the US Open. With help from Bowdoin facilities and housekeeping, the field for this year’s US Open has been rolled out. As you can see from the picture, there are quite a few wrinkles. Over the next few days the carpet will flatten (maybe get a stream cleaning) and the four sections will be joined together. The fifth section, in the background of the picture, will serve as a practice field. More updates to come!
A bit belated, but here’s a link to our family weekend videos. The lighting conditions were terrible, but we still managed to see very well and played some pretty decent soccer.
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJOPWrClEzSmeEJ7tXAmcccCYMt31R8yi
Enjoy
Check out our code at github.com/northern-bites/nbites or click the wiki tab to get some more information!
Meeting Wednesday 8pm Searles 120. We will have food!
We lost. They scored an own goal so technically they scored four times as much as we did in the game. We didn’t have fast enough reaction time and couldn’t move the ball around enough to keep control. We placed 3rd in our pool and were eliminated, but we did make it to the top 16 for the 7th year in a row and actually deserved it this time. Also we scored no own goals when other teams (including B-Human) have scored several. We’ll come back next year… Thanks to everyone for their support! Pictures and Video will be coming probably to our YouTube channel as well.
Another pretty good game. Wireless was more or less working and that looks like it’s going to be the norm. The game started off slowly, but we scored two goals in the first half and one in the second half. At the end of the second half our goalie was pulled for pushing and had trouble getting back into position. We came close to scoring an own goal but manged to hold out. A good game. If we win our next game against Edinferno (University of Edinburgh), we advance to the quarter finals. However, we would play B-Human on a different field. Apparently the wireless is worse and the lighting is different so Josh and Brian are taking pictures for Professor Chown to calibrate. But one game at a time… Pictures and video I’m sure will come soon.
So we had some better wireless today. We found that we seem to randomly drop wireless and take 30 seconds to reconnect. So with wireless more or less working, we managed to scrum with Penn enough to hold them back somewhat. And we scored a goal; that was good. Our goalie almost made a great save as well: the ball was heading right to it’s feet so naturally it decided to try to save it and squatted, but the ball passed right under it before it got low enough. We had some interesting refereeing and issues with them messing with our robots, but all in all it was a pretty good game. Hopefully we will win the other two games in our pool tomorrow and advance to the quarterfinals, but regardless we are in the top 16 for the 7th year in a row.
In other news, we participated in the unofficial league race after only one team showed up. We felt bad so we gave them some competition. Our robot started walking, but decided it was unstable and stopped 2 steps in. We were only about 50cm behind them when the race finished (pretty good for not stretching first).
Zoe, Jayne, River, and Wash ready for the second half in their blue uniforms.
This game started off rough. We had tested our wireless half an hour before the game and were pleased that all our robots were communicating, but five minutes before we had no communication. There was a flurry to fix a bug that we barely caught, 3 minutes before the game but NTU called a timeout and we were able to re-install our fixed code but our communication was still not working. We decided to just go for it with no communication because we can play without it, although not nearly as well. We got manually positioned with kick off as the pink team. Usually the blue team has kick off, but since NTU took a timeout, we got kickoff. Play proceeded for a while, still with no communications between robots… But we scored!! We managed to score on the correct goal without localization or communication. There was much rejoicing. Brian and Octavian were hunting for other wireless networks that could be interfering with ours, but Brian tracked down the problem to a faulty cable that was connected to our own router. As soon as it was unplugged, our robots’ ears lit up bright blue (they do that when the receive information from other robots). We scored another beautiful goal with communication before the half ended and we switched to the blue team.
Now we could listen to the Game Controller, the piece of software that tells the robots what’s going on in the game (e.g. a goal was just scored, there’s 3:27 left in the half, a robot is penalized). So we could position autonomously on the field which lets us get much closer to the ball than being manually positioned (a significant advantage). As we were turning on our robots, Jayne (one of our robots) said “Head Processor Hot” which means it’s CPU is overheating. This is a very bad warning and often is a result of their fans not working. Sure enough the fan was off and we made a quick substitution: Mal for Jayne.
We scored more goals in one game than we have since 2009. An impressive feat.
We again started with kick off because we were the blue team this half, though the referee forgot so we didn’t kick in to our special kick off behavior. The Game Controller sends information about who is kicking off and it sent the information too late for us to pay attention to it. Regardless, we scored again. And again. Making the score 4-0. We had some problems with our role-switching and didn’t always go after the ball or stay with the ball when we should have, but overall we looked great. We were driving toward the opponent goal and keeping it away from our own. It was a fantastic game!
We are now working on some of our minor issues for our next game at 6:00pm vs L3M. Hopefully that will go as well as this last game. We will post video of the game at some point so stay tuned!