Category Archives: RoboCup 2007

RoboCup 2007: nBites vs. FCTWaves

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.

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RoboCup 2007: nBites vs. Austin Villa [test match]

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

RoboCup 2007: nBites vs. Jolly Pochie

 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.

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Post-RoboCup 2007 Diary: Day Three

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.

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CMU Chin Shot

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Artboy-RC07-649, originally uploaded by Glenn Zucman.

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.

Post-RoboCup 2007 Diary: Day Two

Part of a slow-coming but technically proficient series of diary entries from the RoboCup 2007 competition:
Day Zero
Day One
Day Three

Day 2. The Second Day. RoboCup World Championships 2007. Here we go.

This day was by far one of the most infuriating days in RoboCup history. It all came down to the lighting. First off, we only had three fields. Three fields for 24 teams. Last year in Germany they had four fields, and none of them were practice fields. They were all game fields. Secondly, the lighting, even by the morning of the second day of set-up, was horrid. The lighting inside the Fox was really dim to begin with — I myself had deluded visions of ghosts past in the team room — and the beams on the fields were not enough. Joho was up there on those ladders with his flip-flops in hand finding lighting solutions with Naomi, the spunky NUbot vision guru. We all got to the venue @ 7 am to meet with lighting guys who were supposed to show up.

The morning was kind of a blur, as of course the lighting guys didn’t show up right away. The lighting guys came, and after much appeals from myself and Chown-Dawg, a real boss came and was not happy with the progress. He sent out for more lights, the best solution we could think of, and when they came back, things started to click in. The new lights were, according to Joho, what we needed.

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Post-RoboCup 2007 Diary: Day One

Part of a slow-coming but technically proficient series of diary entries from the RoboCup 2007 competition:
Day Zero
Day Two
Day Three

MORNING:

Day One is game-face day. One needs to make entrance to international robotic dog soccer competitions. Tucker, Jesse and I decide to take care of registration. Jesse asks me: “Are you sure you have the registration materials?” “I’ve got it covered. No problem.” So we stroll.

Suddenly, as we stroll through midtown Atlanta, I’m hungry as all get-up. So where do we go? That’s right, American’s Kitchen: CVS Pharmacy. A few granola bars later, I’m straight. So after some guessing, we think that our best bet to get to Georgia Tech campus is to catch a bus 12 blocks away. We get there. Man, is it hot, we think. We wait around wondering if we’ve reached the right place. Finally, we see a special ‘Stinger Bus’ fitted with a ‘ROBOCUP’ sign. I grimaced as it isn’t properly punctuated as ‘RoboCup’. Never the less, despite their sheer insolence, we board. On the bus… RoboCup people from foreign lands! Sweet!

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Post-RoboCup 2007 Diary: Day Zero

Part of a slow-coming but technically proficient series of diary entries from the RoboCup 2007 competition:
Day One
Day Two
Day Three

As in Computer Science, this journal starts with Day Zero. I’m flying at thirty thousand feet with the nBites crew, and the outdoor elements are making bad metaphors outside of the plane. On the starboard side (does boat terminology work on airplanes?) , there is a perfect ROYGBIV sunset. On the left hand side, a raging lightning storm of death. Remarkably, this plane is flying straight through the middle. I can only figure that this can only be a sign of the journey to come. Either we fade gloriously into the sunset, or a lightning bolt fries our ass. Atlanta, here we come.

–Weeks Later–

Well, it turns out that neither greatness nor failure can happen sometimes. We got diverted. As ball-lightning descended upon the ginormous Hartsfield International Airport, we went elsewhere. We landed with other planes @ an airport without jetways. We hung out there, posturing as we considered bringing our robots out of their shells and let them stretch their legs on the floor. We took off again, and made it to Atlanta. We were blearly-eyed as we ran into a group of blind people getting on the terminal subway. We were worried when one decided to go left exiting instead of right.

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