[patrickrd]

Today is day two of three setup days. Yesterday we completed setting up our cameras on top of the playing field, in addition to setting up all our computers and wireless system. I've attached a photo of three of the four small size playing field where we compete. Last night we had some problems with our local network, and we have had to send some emails to people back home to get the proper passwords and permissions to do everything we need to do. Fortunately, this is not an urgent problem as all major systems are functional as is. We ran one of our robots around last night on joystick control, to check that wireless is functional, and it performed flawlessly.

For me, the highlight of yesterday was when we took out our robots for other teams to look at, and looking at all the other team's robots. Being returning champions, there is a lot of interest to see what changes we have made and how our new robots look. Unfortunately, many teams do not have much mechanical engineering involvement, thus are unable to build high performance bots and match our physical capabilities. In fact, one team of the 24 small size teams is constructed from legos. On the other hand, most other teams have far more advanced artificial intelligence capabilities than our team, and many are mechanically very similar. Hopefully, the mechanical advantages and control advantages of our robots will be great enough to outperform all other teams. I spent much of yesterday talking to other teams about our designs, problems, and solutions.

Today, the CS guys are working hard to make improvements to the artificial intelligence. In particular, they are making improvements to our offensive roles. Also, there has been some trouble with our vision system. The lighting is in fact so bright here that our black robot hats do not appear black to the camera. A couple team members are out at local stores looking for a very dark black material that will not reflect light back to the camera. Hopefully, we will be ready to play a scrimmage game against our 2002 robots or against another willing team this afternoon. Mechanically, I had to replace a couple gears on one of our robots this morning, which was a nice change of pace because I didn't have much work to do at all yesterday. I am sure that as we begin to use the robots more and more (and compete starting this weekend) that we will have more maintenance to do on the robots.

Aside from the robotics competition, the food in Italy is great! The pizza is without a doubt much better than in the United States. Also, the ice cream here is AMAZING. On the other hand, the hotels here are much more expensive and much smaller. I have had some difficulty as of yet finding restaurants with anything but pizza, but I am sure I will be able to find some other food soon enough. I've been told that real Italian food, however, is much further south in Italy. I will have an opportunity to go south after the competition to demonstrate our robots for an arts festival in Spoleto, hopefully I will have time to travel over to Rome for one day.

- Patrick