Dates for our 2008 Robocup schedule are starting to come together. Right now we are definitely planning on going to the world championships in Suzhou China from July 14-20, and entering in at least the Nao league. We will also probably apply to compete in the Aibo league again, though that’s not for certain at this stage. In addition to China, we will also be attending the local US OPEN in Pittsburgh, Penn. from May 24-27 (no website yet).
Although we considered going to the German OPEN in April, the expense and the lack of Nao’s, as well as our uncertainty about the Aibo’s were all factors in deciding not to go this year. Hopefully we’ll get to go back there again next year and play in the Nao league.
We start off in blue. Nice grab and start-off dodge.
A little movement and cue best action sequence in Northern Bites/RoboCup history. Let’s watch that again! We grab. Their goalie attempts a kick. This kick is ridiculous, and takes approximately two seconds to execute. We grab and turn towards goal. Their goalie gets unbalanced, and flips over. We bump the ball and continue running after it. The goalie then calls its own ‘standup’ procedure while we ram it in the side. It flips over again. One of their human teammates yells ‘PUSHING! PUSHING!!!’, though its goalie is not technically in the box. I hear Chown in the video yell ‘What?!’. It doesn’t matter. Another Blue swoops in, misses a grab, illegal defender, grabs, turns, scoots to open space, goal. 1-0. Man, do I hate the crappy black advertisements behind the goals. What the Eff! The guy who placed them out asked me if it was O.K. to do so; I should have said no. The new goals where supposed to make things viewable.
Today the Aibo technical comittee announced a portion of the updated rules for Robocup 2008. The size of the field will be increased by 25% in each dimension, to 5m by 7.5m. This represents an extra 50% of field area! To help take advantage of the new field size, teams will now consist of 5, instead of 4 robots per field. This will be a great opertunity to increase the high level soccer strategy of our team. Since the field is getting larger, the comittee has also hinted that the field lines will get wider to aid in line recognition. The official rules have yet to be published, so we’ll post the details then. The comittee has also called for qualification documents for entry to the Nao league. Presumably our paper will be mostly about why our success in the Aibo league will transfer to success in the Nao league.
This game came about because there was one pool with two teams: CMU and AustinVilla (texas). So, we got to play in an official test match, one that didn’t count but we got the field reserved and stuff. Joho was the ref, and so we gave him crap the whole time. The texas guys are great folks, so it was fun to play against them, and test out stuff.
Our initial drives were pretty good. Our sweet pre-programmed dodge at the kickoff worked pretty well, and we were getting really good shots on a really good goalie. We were testing some new ball capture code. Doesn’t look like I wrote the behavior hack for defensive ready state yet. This field had some great mountainous ridges of carpet. We controlled the ball really well. We went up 3-0 from their goalie being caught out-of-position. Texas was having a lot of vision calibration problems stemming from not having a vision person accompany them on the trip. Mohan, their vision guy and the heart and soul of the Four-Legged League, was home sick from traveling too much pre-RoboCup.
5-0 off some more sweet team play. The fifth goal came from a really nice 1-2 sequence from our middy to our offense, that nailed it in. Our grab looked really good despite playing on Field A (all of our other games were on Field B). 6-0 ended half-time from a shot from HALF FIELD. Never seen that before. Continue reading
The game started, ironically, without a ball to play with. The referee blew the whistle, but neglected to put a ball down on the field. We notched our first goal fairly quickly, missing one grab that went OB (out of bounds), but keeping the ball near their end and following up after a shot that we grabbed right on the post that thankfully flailed into the goal instead of away from it. We were able to dominate control of the ball, either grabbing it or at least moving it in a way that favored us. Jolly Pochie used an innovative kick where you approach the ball from the side and the kick using the outside of your leg, with a swipe. I had seen this kick used by ASURA in Bremen. I like it for certain situations, but Jolly Pochie tried to line up with it consistently and we were able to beat them to the ball and grab before they could set up.
We have a bit of a fracas with the refs, again, when they hesitated to put the ball down on an OB by us, placed in the wrong position, then let play go on for a few seconds, got yelled at by Jolly, and then picked the ball back up and placed it properly. After the ball is placed, you leave it. As usual, we feel like passionate defenders of truth during the heat of the moment, but after watching the video, we just come off as passionate jerks. We scored a few minutes later on a shot that lands near the goal, grabbing it and spinning the wrong direction but hitting it in. 2-0.
Part of a slow-coming but technically proficient series of diary entries from the RoboCup 2007 competition:
–Day Zero
–Day One
–Day Two
Another 7 A.M. start. This time, I arose from a different bed in our luxury suite. We had consolidated our four palatial mansions down to two, and so Nick Dunn and Mark flooded Jesse and my domain. I had the master bedroom the night before, but gave it up so that I could have a bed to myself in a smaller room. Getting up wasn’t that hard; there were things to be done.
We, as usual, made it to the Fox before anyone else. Being located across the street to the venue certainly gave us an advantage, albeit an expensive one. We got to have 30-45 minutes of solid debugging with all our dogs out on the field before others started to encroach upon space. Things were working pretty well. I can’t remember finding any serious bugs then, mostly because we hadn’t played yet. We were scheduled to play @ 14:30 against Jolly Pochie.
Hey Folks. Due to popular demand, I’ve put up high quality video files from all of our RoboCup 2007 matches. Check them out on our media page. Just a warning: they are big files.
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This is part of a ridiculously good photo set of RoboCup 2007 by Glenn Zucman that I found tonight. There are a ton of good shots of our team in here. Thanks Glenn, for making these available!!
UPDATE::Check out the Slideshow.
http://robocup-cn.org/. Just a shell, though, no content yet.
