Hi everyone,
Sorry for the lack of updates over the past couple days, things have been busy. Here is a summary of how things have gone:
Thursday 03 Jul:
Thursday was a fairly uneventful day for me. There were no major mechanical problems, and the artificial intelligence team was busy at work on the AI. The highlight was in the evening when we played a 3vs3 scrimmage game against our old robots. A very large croud gathered around us, eager to see how we fared against our old world champion bots. The 2003 easily prevailed.
Friday 04 Jul:
Independence day turned out to be extremely busy for me. I woke up before 7am, and headed to the competition site. During the morning, I prepared all the robots for competition, and all passed the checklists. The CS guys spent much of the morning and afternoon preparing for a passing competition later in the evening. The dribblers were tested far more extensively than ever before, and at the end I realized that the dribblers would need some major work. Nevertheless, we won the passing competition with 10 successful passes. After that small event, Ken and I set to work at working on the dribblers. The problem was that many of the plastic bevel gears were stripping... A result of improper alignment and high torque. To fix the problem, we decided to replace the gears attached to the motor shafts with brass gears, replace any bad plastic gears, and reassemble with proper meshing. At first the procedure worked fine, until we realized that our method of securing the bevel gears to motor shafts was not strong enough. The problem turned out to be very difficult to solve, and we tried about five different things before Len came up with an idea that worked very well. By about 2:00am this morning (the 5th), we completed the gear replacements and now have a very robust dribbling system. Hopefully, all our work on the dribbling system will ultimately prevent disasters that could have arisen. After we finished, the AI team was ready to play a 5vs5 scrimmage against our 2002 robots. This was necessary to test our complete system before our first official game at 9am on the 5th (today). The scrimmage went OK in our opinion. There were many improvements we saw, but still several holes in our strategy needing to be patched. After the scrimmage, the entire mechanical team (Ken, Len, Dave, and I) spent the early hours of the morning pregaming the robots for competition. After all was done, we headed home about 4:30am
Sat 05 Jul (today):
I woke up this morning at about 7:15, showered, and headed immediately to the competition site without breakfast. Even though the robots were verified to be 100% last night, I wanted to be sure everything went smoothly. Our first game was at 9am this morning against B-SMART, a team from Germany. There was absolutely no trouble preparing for the game, and we started right on time. Our opponents had 3 immoble robots. Playing with our gains way down to prevent risk of failure, we easily cruised to a 10-0 victory.
Game 1:
Big Red 10, B-SMART 0
Our next game is at 6pm this evening, again against a team that should not pose a big challenge. We are currently competing in the first round-robin stage, where we each compete against most every other team in our 6-team division. The best 3 in each division advance to the next round, which is a 3-team round robin, where the winners advance to elimination matches. The robots look in very good shape, and AI is busy improving the strategy.
Over the past couple days I have learned some more about Italian culture. Pizza is everywhere (at least in Padova). Whenever I go to a restaurant, most everyone is eating a pizza. Some restaurants do not serve anything but pizza! I have become very proficient at ordering pizza, pepperoni & mushroom being my favorite: "Vorrei diavola con funghi." I also am becoming proficient at the Italian number system, and have found that stores hate when you don't have exact change. We have also felt unwelcome at a couple places, a sign that there is some anti-american sentiment in Northern Italy. But for the most part, people are courtious and friendly.
That's it for now, I will try to post another update after this evening's game but I might opt for sleep instead, which I have been lacking lately
- Patrick