Dutch Nao Team

Our day started by going to the Robolab to pick up the Nao’s. Then, we arrived at the airport at 13:30. After a lot of waiting (it was already 14:45 while boarding supposedly started at 15:00), we could finally proceed to the gate. After a very interested customs officer inspected our robots (“Could you turn it around please? So you can’t let it walk?”) we were in the air! We made a fuel stop at Budapest airport and saw a movie with hilarious English translations (one of the best was “You’re on a king’s moustache”, meaning something along the lines of “You’ve got it made”). The people on the aircraft were very friendly. We even met someone who was on the Iranian rescue league team a few years back. He invited us to come to Isfahan when we have the time. It’s pretty far though, so we don’t know if we will take him up on his offer, but still, it’s very nice.

We depart in just a few days, so there is a lot of pressure. We’re trying to get everything to go as smoothly as possible, but sometimes things don’t go as planned…

Today (29-03-2011) Camiel returned from the Iranian embassy with empty hands for the second time. It was so kind of him to pick up our Visas last Thursday, but for no apparent reason it was closed. Today he went again, but it turned out that we all have to be there in person. This means that tomorrow we all have to go to Den Haag. Poor Camiel, he tried so hard…

Vision is going well. Progress has been achieved on goal detection. However, using OpenCV’s HoughLines2 function for line detection is still a mystery.

Motion is pretty much done. We’ve got some amazing moves to show. Now it’s all about fine-tuning the planner. Which means lots and lots of testing.

^_^

At the previous meeting we decided to make a new planner. This new planner will be based on phases and states.

From now on, the Dutch Nao Team will give at least one update per captain per week! Isn’t it great? If a captain happens to forget a written report on the weeks activities, there will be cake! So place your nao on the ground, on his stomach with his arms at his sides, and a party associate will arrive shortly to collect you for your party.

This day was the second round of the preliminaries. Our Nao’s faced the same opponents as the previous day (Austrian Kangaroos and Los Hidalgos). Again the Nao’s had trouble connecting to our router, when the router was switched off and on again. In the last match we even had to reconfigure one nao during the first half of the match. After the matches we went home for a quick fresh up. Then we went to the workshops where Arnoud gave a presentation about the virtual RoboRescue. The Austrian kangaroos spoke about their way of approach in the standard platform league. The Los Hidalgos spoke about their strategies in the standard platform league. The Italian team spoke about their way of research in their university with Lego Mindstorms. The American team showed us their research in robotics towards children. Sharon and Steven gave a presentation about RoboTag in the last few presentations. After the presentations all teams went to a restaurant near by to have a nice conversation during dinner.

After working late into the night to create a working program, we discovered that this was a waste of time because (as most of you may already know) the Nao’s have an exaggerated xenophobia for IP addresses other than ’255.255.255.255′. Any attempt to connect to a game controller from the official IP address was met with socket error 99: can not assign requested address. Suddenly we had to adjust the planner within 20 minutes. That caused indent errors, unmatched parenthesis errors, socket already in use errors, etc. Another problem was the network, there was a power shortage and we could not connect the nao to SSH. We could not achieve a lot in those 20 minutes (ultimately longer because of the power outage). The second game was already finished, after we finally had a debugged version of the planner that listened to pressing the chest button. It also was not possible to quickly put a Nao in the game, because autoload.ini failed and the Nao’s could not connect to SSH.

After going to an internet place we went to the Galilei Institute at 9:00 am. The day started with testing all the moves, whether the nao still can walk or kick after transport. We noticed another ball was used with a different radius and colour.A live stream was set up and added to the site. The web-cam we brought with us did not work, but we managed to use our mobile phones as a camera for the stream. There were some other teams trying to fix their code. One of the teams had Nao’s moving pretty fast, but the Nao’s fell a lot. It would be a tough competition if they will be able to finish their code. The local team was still busy to make their vision work. After having some dinner we continued writing code. Now the footleds are reacting how they should and the chestbutton can be used for penalizing. Our nao can now follow the rules and know which states he is in, but in the night we did continue to program to really let them play. The streams were not broadcasting, because there were problems with the electricity. That is why the matches were be delayed to a later time. We sneaked into a classroom to continue with our Nao’s and fortunately there was an internet connection in there, while the other team were waiting for it.

At 9:00 am we arrived at Fiumicino airport and went to the apartment near the Termini station. The apartment is near the Galilei university, where the Robocup is located. At first we stayed at the apartment to configure the Nao’s with the router. After that the internet connection dropped, so we decided to work further the next day. Most of us were tired of programming the entire night.