Were you trying to hide in this picture? ;)

Anyway, congratulations, and welcome back to the states :)

Update 14.07.2003 5:40pm
 

Hey everyone,

Thanks for all the messages! I'm finishing my brief tour of Italy up (currently at my last stop of Venice) today and have a long travel day tomorrow all the way back to Ithaca.

Now that I have a little time and need a short break from touring the city (and am only paying 0.13 euro per minute at this internet cafe :eek: ) I'll post a description of our last game.

Our championship match against the Euro was just like our first against the RoboRoos, only our robots were performing much better due to changes we had made over the prior few days. Both defenses (ours and the australians) were supurb. Due to this, neither team was able to score in the first half. Since the score was still 0-0 at the half, our team opted to flip some dipswitches on all our robots that we had only used once prior in the competition. This put our robots in "turbo mode" and increased our acceleration and max velocity by up to 50%, at the risk of overheating and burning out motors.

Fortunately, we did not burn out any motors. However, we were still unable to penetrate the RoboRoos defense, even with the extra speed. To make matters worse, we received a yellow card for too much hard contact, which was a result of turbo mode. Just a minute or two in the second half, we received a second yellow card for the same reason, resulting in a red card. We were then forced to remove a robot from the field for the rest of the game (including the eventual overtime). Even with one robot down, we had no trouble holding the score at 0-0, and forced overtime.

Overtime began with the same type of play, and we were all very very tense about what would happen. Personally, I was very worried that we would be called for two defenders in the goalbox, which would have resulted in a penalty kick at our goal. Fortunately, as I was pondering our situation, one of our robots named Spartacus gained possession of the ball in the RoboRoos left corner. Spartacus strafed accross the field, clearly taking advantage of turbo mode, and shot the ball up in the air into the right top corner of the goal :D And just like that, we won the game and the championship. Ironically, Spartacus was the robot that gave us the most trouble all year, and our robots were not designed to "chip kick" (kick up into the air). So another mechanical failure of Spartacus worked to our advantage (or at least looked pretty cool) in scoring the goal.

Videos, photos, etc...
 

I have videos of all our matches, photos, and more. I will try and get these all up on the internet later this week when I am back in New York.

Patrick :)