RoboCup American Open 2004

[patrickrd]

Hey everyone,

For those interested, the RoboCup American open is taking place beginning today and ending Tuesday in New Orleans. This is the second annual American Open, while the international competition has been around for 7 years. The international competition will take place at the end of June in Lisbon, Portugal.

My team is one of ten competing in the F180 Small Sized league. For those that followed my updates exclusively of chiefdelphi.com last year, you know we were the international champion for the fourth time in five years.

Of course, I will be posting updates (if I have internet access) in this thread of how the event goes.

For more information about RoboCup and the American Open:
http://www.robocup.org
http://www.cs.uno.edu/~usopen04/main/index.html

[patrickrd]

This is the second time Cornell will compete in the American Open. Last year, we were not expecting to compete (but rather just do a demonstration). When our team showed up, we were on the competition schedule! The team was not at all prepared, but managed to get second place.

This year, we expect the competition to be a bit more competitive. There are more teams, and the American Open is quickly becoming the competition for teams in North America (many of which do not compete internationally) to try and win a title.

Our team will be unveiling our brand new 2004 robots for the first time this weekend. The robots were JUST finished this past week, and the system remains largly untested. It is not our goal to win the American Open, but rather to get some experience with our new system and our new robots. We have made extensive changes and improvements to our system on mechanical, electrical, and strategical/AI levels. I will try to elaborate on some of these changes once I get to New Orleans.

The rest of my team is already down in New Orleans setting up; I have to catch my flight shortly. Again I'll try and post updates and some pictures from the competition of interesting things I see. It should be a great event!! If you live in the New Orleans area be sure to check it out.

Patrick

[Andrew Rudolph]

So its this week coming up?

[Yan Wang]

Yes, April 24-27, 2004. Good luck to Patrick and the rest of the Cornell University Robocup Team.

[patrickrd]

Well, I've arrived in New Orleans... It's very warm and humid We have an awful lot of problems to work out. Mechanically, we are functional, but lots of systems-level issues to work out. Our first match is tomorrow at 1pm, not sure who we're playing. I'm told there are only 5 teams here in our league... Mostly young teams without much experience. But at least their robots move. I'll post more once I actually see the venue tomorrow.

[patrickrd]

So, there are only five teams here, and only four of which can move. The fifth is us :-p We are having wireless problems, and are unable to communicate with our robots. It's strange because wireless was tested and worked before we left New York. Now, it does not work. Our wireless people are not at the competitoin, so it is much more difficult for us to diagnose what is wrong. Most of the team is at the hotel getting sleep right now, since they were up all night. I'm hopeful we can fix wireless enough to at least run something.

We COULD fairly easily take out our 2003 robots, and win the competition. However, we don't really want to do that since they are not the robots we spent all year working on, and have already proven that they are winning robots. We'd much rather get our 2004 system working, even if it barely works.

So... we forfeited one match today. We were supposed to have a second match, but it was delayed until tomorrow to give us more time to get our system working. The four other teams are Manatoba (Canada), Mexico, Laval (Canada), and Buffalo. Most I think are first year teams. Buffalo is a first year team, is a college club, and is actually very impressive. They've put together a working system that is able to easily beat all the teams here, and they only started in September.

Looks like it's time to go. Hopefully a better day tomorrow!!

[patrickrd]

Well we still haven't gotten our system working, but I'm very optimistic and in good spirits. We made a lot of improvements to our system, fixed the major bugs, and it should be ready to run first thing in the morning. But of course, it's never been run before, so i'm sure it will be far from perfect, if even functional. I can't wait to see our 5 new robots in action!!

We've got three matches tomorrow. Basically, we just need to win one to advance to the elimination matches, since four of the five advance from the round robin. Then it's single elimination. The first single elimination match is tomorrow evening, then the finals are on Tuesday morning. Goodnight all.

[patrickrd]

Sorry for the lack of updates... I didn't have time to update this while in New Orleans since my last post.

Anyway, I'm back in Ithaca. We didn't win the competition -- as we expected. But we did generate a list of problems that exist in our system, and we can systematically eliminate them over the next couple months leading up to the international competition. Congratulations to the University at Buffalo on the win... Truly amazing for a first year team.

[lynca]

does anyone have any suggestions for a new team starting in 2005, the university of texas at Austin is going to start a small size team next year and we were looking for advice. Where do most teams recieve funding and how much is adequate for start up?

good luck Cornell in Lisbon!