Robocup Competiton 2003 - Padua, Italy

[patrickrd]

Tomorrow morning, I will be leaving to compete in the Robocup Small Size league in Padua, Italy. As one of only a few teams representing the United States (there are also teams from Ohio State and Carnegie Mellon), I hope to bring back the small size league champion cup! Cornell University has won the competition three of the past four years, defeating teams from all over the world. I would also like to point out that several members of our team were former FIRST team members in high school and very influential towards our successes! I will make every effort to post updates how the Cornell team is doing daily between July 3 and July 9.

For those interested, Robocup is an organization who's goal is to build a set of robots that can compete against and win against the World Cup soccer champions by the year 2050. At present, Robocup has several leagues set up to work towards this goal, the small-sized league being one of them. In the small sized league, five robots compete autonomously (no human control) against another team on a field slightly larger than a ping pong table.

In the four years Cornell has been involved, we have set the standard for mechanical design. In 2000, Cornell introduced an omni-directional drive system, allowing the robots to accelerate in any direction at any time, with any rotational velocity. Further, a dribbling system was introduced in 2001 that allows the robots to place a backspin on the ball, such that the ball is always accelerating towards the robot, regardless how the robot is traveling. Both innovations have set the standard, and today most every team has attempted to adapt the same technology.

Below you can find a list of links of interest relating to the competition, and a photo taken today of our eight 2003 robots before being packed.

Robocup 2003 Competition Site
Cornell's Robocup Site
Cornell Robocup Media Archive

[kristen]

Good luck, Patrick and everyone else from Cornell

I think I heard something about this competition last year in tech class

[tine_204_639]

Best of luck in Italy - learn a lot of Italian and teach the robots to speak it! (: Big Red will dominate - bring home the gold. And have fun!

[patrickrd]

Originally posted by tine_204_639
Best of luck in Italy - learn a lot of Italian and teach the robots to speak it! (: Big Red will dominate - bring home the gold. And have fun!

Thanks for the good luck wishes. Actually, we've installed audio speakers and a small sound card on board. We can program to say whatever we'd like whenever we'd like them to

- Patrick

[Andy Baker]

Patrick,

Good luck. We'll all be pullin' for you here in the States.

That picture shows quite a crew of 'bots. If I am seeing things correctly, they each have a 4-wheel omni-directional drive base, kinda like the "Kiwi" drive base, but with 4 wheels. Is that right?

I remember some of the concept drawings that you did a couple of years ago... it is great to see that your concepts made it to reality.

Great job!!!!

Andy B.

[Yan Wang]

We already chatted Pat... so just go have fun and EAT PIZZA TILL YOU DROP!!!

[patrickrd]

Yesterday we arrived safely and on time in Venice after a connection in Zurich. Although we all survived the trip, only two of sixteen pieces of luggage arrived! Fortunately, we woke up this morning to find that all luggage (including all the robotics equipment) had arrived at our hotel.

Today (the 2nd), we arrived at the competition site. It is amazing! So many teams from all over the world, and many different types of robots in all the different Robocup leagues. About half of the small size teams have arrived, we are working now to unpack and set up our vision & computer systems.

The next two days (3rd and 4th) will also setup days, with competition beginning the fifth.

Got to run for now, my team is leaving without me for lunch

- Patrick

[Yan Wang]

Upload pictures

[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

[BobAnnDingle]

Hi, Pat. Glad to hear everything is going well so far. It's fun reading the postings here each day. Don't each too much pizza! Good luck this weekend. Ciao. Love Mom & Dad.

[Yan Wang]

Yeah, looking at the robot this year and previous years, Cornell has always had the upper hand in mechanical advantage. I hope you guys do well. I checked out the website for Padua and Robocup.org but I didn't see any webcasts. Are there going to be any of the competition?

Oh yeah, and that looking for black material reminds me of NYC regional in 2002 when we had to get pain for the gripper arms That was painful.

Good luck.

[PS, Independence Day here if you've already forgotten... go set off some fireworks, Pat.]

[patrickrd]

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

[patrickrd]

At 6pm we had our second game of the day, this time against Plasma-Z of Thailand. The game began on time, but we were immediately forced to use a time out because our team member who manages full autonomy (which handles communication with the referee) was not present to get the autonomy working properly. Fortunately, we were able to resolve the problem before our maximum 10 minutes expired and begin the game.

Once the game began, we were able to score on virtually every possesion, and the opponent was unable to gain possesion of the ball for more than a second or two. After we scored five very quick goals, Plasma-Z had computer trouble, and was forced to take a time out. Plasma-Z then immediately forfeited and we won the game by forfeit, 10-0.

Game 2:
Big Red 10, Plasma-Z 0

Mechanically, we had zero major failures during both games. However, one of the horizontal dribbling motors is showing signs that it will soon fail and we will be replacing it tonight.

Ciao - Patrick

[patrickrd]

Last night I got a good 10+ hours of sleep, so am feeling much better rested. On to today's news, which is only a brief update since many people on our team are trying to get on the laptops to use internet.

At 11am this morning we had our third game. Our opponents today were the Canuks from Canada. We began our game at half speed (a cautionary measure against slow opponents), and scored a fairly quick goal. However, the beginning minutes were very shaky. Our robots did not seem to be moving very smoothly or moving how our AI should command them to. For example, our robot would have possesion of the ball and a clear path to advance upfield, but would sit dribbling the ball and do nothing for a few seconds before deciding to move. Further, a bizarre play off a free kick nearly gave up a goal to the Canuks. During a quick timeout, the AI team disabled a mode they were experimenting with, and we upped our gains to full speed (although we have even a faster "turbo" speed we can use in the future). After the swithes, our robots worked very well. Although the performance of the Canuks was the best we have competed against yet, it was still not among the competition's best, and we again cruised to a 10-0 victory. This third victory guarantees that we advance to the second round of competition, with at least 2nd seed in our new round robin group. I should mention, since we are winning by 10 goals often, that the rules state the game ends early after a 10 point advantage, and that is why all our scores are by 10.

Game 3:
Big Red 10, Canuks 0

Our next game is not until tomorrow at six pm, thus there is much time to prepare for our next opponent. We will need it! Tomorrow we play the last team we have not yet played in our round robin division, the RoboRoos from Australia. The RoboRoos have also cruised to 10-0 victories against the same three opponents, and we consider them to be among the best teams at the competition. Although they are not quite as fast as us, they have a slightly more powerful kick and can also dribble the ball reasonably well. Their AI appears to be very similar to ours, but we never know what kind of plays they will try against us. It should be a very good test of our system, and our first opportunity to get a good look at how good we are this year. Best case, our system works great and we can outperform and outmaneuver them, and have another strong win. On the other hand, if we have holes in our strategy that we haven't anticipated, and we are not able to get around their strong defense, we could be defeated by any margin. A loss would be embarassing and disappointing, but on the plus side, we would learn exactly what our holes are and we would have time to fix them. Learning about them in the second round or elimination matches would be much worse. In any case, I'm optimistic, but of course we have to respect and expect the very best of each and every opponent.

And last night I again had pizza, since we were at a restaurant that had nothing but pizza. They kept on screwing up orders, but the place was great. They kept on bringing out all sorts of appetizers. We all only finished about half of the food, and were completely stuffed. And then of course they served excellent iced cream for desert. And then I slept from 10pm until about 8:30 this morning.

Ok, that's it for my update, which I guess was longer than I was planning. Hopefully Dave is not too upset for me using his computer for too long. I put on a picture of the restaurant last night... sorry I'm not in it, I have some of me on Dave's camera but haven't gotten copies of them yet.

- Patrick

[patrickrd]

Game 5:
RoboRoos 4, Big Red 0

Quick update, I will fill in the details when time permits. At 6pm this evening we played our last game of the round robin, and were soundly defeated by the RoboRoos from Australia. There were many problems with our robots, and the RoboRoos quite frankly were incredibly solid in all areas of play. We have diagnosed problems and are currently working to correct this problem before our games tomorrow

After first round robin:
We advance to 2nd round with a total of 12 teams. There will be four round robin groups, 3 teams in each group. We will be playing the Lucky Stars from Singapore and the TPots from Singapore. The 4 winners will advance to the elimination matches.