24 Nao Applicants; 12 to be accepted; the rest to set their robots loose

Leave a reply

So here are the 24 applicants trying to get Nao’d:

1. BabyTigers DASH
2. BreDoBrothers
3. Cerberus
4. CMU-GT
5. Eagle Knights
6. Humboldt Berlin
7. Isfahan
8. Kouretes
9. Mi-PAL
10. Northern Bites
11. NUbots
12. NUIM
13. rUNSWift
14. RWTH-TUG-UCT
15. sharPKUngfu
16. SpelBots
17. SPQR
18. TeamChaos
19. TecRams
20. TJArk
21. UChile
22. UT Austin Villa
23. UWarriors
24. WrightEagle

And here are my notes:

  • BreDo Brothers == Bremen (Thomas Rofer) + Dortmund (Walter and Matthias). They both did Humanoid teams last year, giving them a big leg up.
  • CMU-GT == Carnegie Mellon + Georgia Tech. Should be interesting.
  • Humboldt Berlin. Interesting that they’re in it. I heard they were going to just do the Humanoid League this year. Certainly, a standard platform is more attractive than doing hardware, to an Aibo team.
  • NUbots. Again, another team I thought had jumped ship.
  • rUNSWift. This is an awesome, old team that has won twice, consistently have finished high, and finished second in 2006. They didn’t compete this year, but it seems that they are back with the excitement of a new platform.
  • RWTH-TUG-UCT. This is a German + Austrian + South African team. Potentially, the first RoboCup team from Africa. Also, they’ve got the World Cup in 2010, going to be held in South Africa, angle.

Now we’ve got to think regionally: two Mexican teams (Eagle Knights and TecRams), three Chinese teams (TJArk, WrightEagle, sharPKUngfu), four Aussie teams (Mi-PAL, NUbots, UNSW, UWarriors), and four US teams (CMU-GT, nBites, SpelBots, Austin). I’m thinking that the committee weighs regions. Teams that merge will have a lot better chance of getting in. It’ll be interesting to see what happens

Bits and Bytes — Wednesday, Oct. 3rd

Leave a reply
  • Rick Middleton, everyone’s favorite Kalman Filter guru from the NUbots, is now @ NUIM, the National University of Ireland Maynooth, and has brought RoboCup with him. They are aiming to get into the Nao league. Here’s a link [100mb] to a presentation he’s given along with some clips. As he says on his website, the NUbots have placed in the top three since they joined 2002. That’s pretty sweet.
  • Speaking of NUbots, I’ve had the pleasure to hang out with Mike Quinlan out here in Silicon Valley. One thing he mentioned was that at his new lab, at UT Austin, they have enough room for the new 5×7.5m field and enough Aibos to invite to a tea party. That’ll certainly be an advantage for them this year.
  • One of the things the 4LL (now SPL) prided itself with when each league gave a brief demonstration (gong show!) was the history kept on its site. Well, here it is — and it’s got some pretty sweet stuff.
  • Is ‘Bits and Bytes’ too lame of a name?

Bits and Bytes — Tuesday, Sept. 18th

Leave a reply
  • Tucker Hermans, rockstar junior nBites member studying abroad in Berlin, now has a blog and a flickr account.
  • The NUbots, or at least as we know them, have retired their aibos. From their website: “After a long and successful career our team of AIBO robots is going to retire from active competition. Their last demo game was at the University of Newcastle information day on 8. September 2007. Although the Sony AIBO robot is not built anymore and the RoboCup Four-Legged League is fading out the members and adjoints of the Newcastle Robotics Lab continue research on several exiting robotics related projects such as bi-ped walk, robot simulations, robot vision, human-robot interaction, as well as further development of the robot bear in collaboration with Tribotix.”
  • Mark and Henry have found an apartment in Mountain View, CA, and are planning out their revolutionary products.
  • Because Henry got an iPhone, nBites gets iPod-sized videos of all its matches. Check them out on the Media page.
  • Google Video, High Quality, and iPod-sized versions of the other semi-final game, between the NUbots and WrightEagle, are now available.
  • A well-meaning but very odd blurb showed up about us in the Orient, instead of the front page above the fold story we deserve. How exactly we won a gold ‘metal’ abroad in Atlanta, we’re not sure, but scientists are working on it as we speak.

RoboCup 2007: nBites vs. FCTWaves

Leave a reply

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.

Continue reading →

Northern Bites’ ranks swell

1 Reply

As of today, we have addded 3 more students to our team; Seth, Yuna and Andy. The sophomores will spend the next couple weeks learning the ropes, and then aid us in our quest for world domination. The extra man power will be crucial once we start developement on two robot platforms at once (Aibo and Nao). The rest of us (George, Nick, Jeremy and I) are starting to get back into the swing of robocup. We’ve nailed down many planned improvements, and have set our sights on a repeat victory in China. Our first out-of-lab test match will be in early October, pitting our code from Atlanta against code from Hannover in Dagget lounge.

Aibo league upgrades field size, team size

Leave a reply

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.

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

Leave a reply

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 →