More videos online
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More videos online |
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After getting some sleep, our cutter Marcel is working to get the videos online.
Up to now the following videos are available:
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Day Five Microsoft Hellhounds are the European Champions!!! |
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Day Five Finals, half time |
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The first half of the game is over and currently we're leading three - zero.
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Day Five Hellhounds in the finals!! |
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MICROSOFT HELLHOUNDS 2 : 0 DUTCH AIBO TEAM |
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Day Five Seeing double |
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Day Five Day Five |
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This is the last day of the Dutch Open, and chances are it will be the most exiting, too - our match in the semi-finals is at half past one. Before that, there are the more relaxing so-called challenges, which require the dogs to perform special tasks, but which do not count towards the overall title.
A team from the German television is here throughout the competition, and we've been in the evening news at least once. They also put an article online referring to the Hellhounds as a likely candidate for the title! We'll do our best to live up to those predictions...
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Day Four Breaking news: Game strategy for the semi-finals |
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After hours of meditation, our team leaders have come up with the depicted bullet-proof strategy for tomorrow's semi-final. Keep in mind that this information must not reach our opponent, fellow semi-finalist, the Dutch Aibo Team, so please do not under any circumstances redistribute it. BTW, the preliminary game versus the Dutch was a 1:1 draw, so chances are this will be an exciting game.
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We can rest assured of our leaders' sanity. |
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Day Four Microsoft Hellhounds are in the semi-finals! |
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We just beat the Hamburg Dog Bots with 3:1, and have qualified for the semi-finals! The wireless lan was out of order most of the time, and nobody knows why, which slowed us down but in the end didn't stop us from winning. Nevertheless, we don't want to experience that again and will spend some time trying to find ways to improve Wifi service reliability and preparing for the worst case by improving the behaviors without team communication. Maybe we should reserve some Ethernet cables just in case...
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Day Four Microsoft Hellhounds - Bremen Byters |
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We left the preliminaries in a blaze by beating the Bremen Byters in a 7:0 game. We finally found an error in our behavior which has plagued us throughout the competition. Now we actually shoot the ball inside the goal instead of targetting the goal posts...
Along with the victory against Team Chaos, we improved our ranking in the preliminaries to third place. We now look forward our match versus the Hamburg Dog Bots in the quarter finals later today. Incidently the last game today, since the semi-finals and the finals take place tomorrow.
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Finally that kick works. Click to enlarge. |
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Day Four We've got issues... |
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The four-legged league is challenging due to inaccurate actuators and tiny cameras - it's robo soccer on a very limited hardware budget. And playing a decent game in Eindhoven is proving to be particularly challenging.
Both fields are covered by a wireless network, provided by two seperate access points. One of them is named "practice" for a reason - it's pretty crappy - the other one, "competition", is a very decent piece of hardware. Unfortunately it still doesn't seem to be up to the task of serving more than two teams worth of Aibos through all the clutter of other wireless networks in the competition hall. Serving 8 robots works fairly well, and should be enough since there is never supposed to be more than one competition game. In practice, there often are, though, and dogs from all teams are having trouble logging in to the access point and engaging in team communication.
Without team communication, parts of the code switch to a fall back behavior, which isn't as smart and just doesn't play on the same level. For instance, all the players just run towards any ball they see, without deciding on a real striker, which of course leads to them impeding one another. Even worse than a straight shutdown of the wifi is a semi-working one, where the dogs stay connected but only get fragments of very high latency information. This confuses the whole behavior and slows down most actions. We're fairly sure it's what happened in our first official game, against the Dutch Aibo Team.
Anyway. When we played against Team Chaos earlier, the wireless lan "fortunately" was totally unavailable for some stretches of time, since there was another match being played on the other field. In the first half of the goal, we scored three goals, while they didn't score any. In fact, Team Chaos hadn't scored any goals throughout the competition. So we weren't too crushed to see them score once during the second half, in particular since we scored another three goals... So the final score was 6:1, not bad.
Oh and by the way, with respects to challenging conditions: someone broke a window in Walter's car and generally roughed it up a bit, after which the car was towed by the police. Walter had to pay for it, too.
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Day Three Microsoft Hellhounds - Aibo Team Humboldt |
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We were defeated 0:1. Of course we learnt a lot in the process so it wasn't a total loss... Man, I have an increasingly hard time coming up with a positive spin to all of this stuff.
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Day Three Microsoft Hellhounds - Darmstadt Dribbling Dackels |
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Just to prove that we don't cheat, we decided to let Darmstadt win the match against us - 3:0! Congrats.
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Day Three Hamburg Dog Bots - Microsoft Hellhounds |
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We could repeat our good score from yesterday's friendly match versus the guys from Hamburg in a real, counting game - 4:0!
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Day Three Microsoft Hellhounds - Dutch Aibo Team |
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After a really short night, our first match versus the Dutch Aibo Team resulted in a 1:1 draw. Oh well.
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Day Two Friendly match versus Hamburg |
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Ready...
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Set...
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Go!
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Microsoft Hellhounds - Hamburg Dog Bots 4:0. So much for the test games. Thanks for the match! Stay tuned for the video.
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Day Two MSH - BB: Two - Zero |
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The friendly match resulted in a 2:0 victory for the Microsoft Hellhounds! But more importantly, the game offered both teams a chance to test the adapted solutions under the same conditions as the real competition matches. Even though there are some outstanding issues left to deal with, the match was great fun to watch. Thanks to the people and robots from the Bremen Byters!
On a sidenote, goals and beacons were finally set up on the second field. Unfortunately the goals are way too small and the beacons aren't colored correctly...
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We're the blue ones. ;) |
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Day One Food for thought |
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We're positive we won't starve. |
We've set up base in Eindhoven. There are ROBOLUDENS flags all over the place, but no direction signs. That didn't stop us, though.
Installing the hardware went very smoothly, and now that our switches are powered up, we've got access to the internet, too. The hall is huge, and a bit chilly. The two playing fields are really close by, but still need some work: there is no center circle, no goals and no beacons. Nevertheless, adapting our code to the new location is in progress, since there's a lot to do: the surface of the field is very different from the one we're used to, so the ball is rolling all over the place... |
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Day One Inventory |
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What does our team need to stay functional in the outside world for five days? Quite a lot. Loaded on to several cars, there are: 21 humanoids (biological), 2 humanoids (mechanical), 9 dogs (mechanical), 107 meters of Cat5 network cable, 3 PCs along with their displays, 16 laptops, about 10 power strips, 8- and 16-port ethernet switches, about 30 batteries along with a number of chargers, a drip coffee machine along with a few cups - and, of course, top-secret scientific tools and voodoo doll representations of the ESR7.
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Day Zero News report started |
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The competitions start tomorrow in Eindhoven, and this is where we will keep you up to date on all events (and a few non-events). The first exciting event will be on Friday at 10 AM - our first match! Until then, there's a lot of work left do to, coffee to drink and sleep to be deprived. We're looking forward to it!
