Written by Caroline and edited by Yang Liu
04.07.2007
4th of July, American’s independent day, it has been four days since our team arrive at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. The weather it is hot here. We spent past few days busy fixing the new robot, although we did bring our previous generation robots with us as a back up. Today it is a big day for us because we have games at 8am, 2pm, and 5pm.
The competition is hold in the Campus Recreation Centre at Georgia Tech. Small size league teams were divided into two groups and located in two competition fields (field A and B). Things didn’t go so well for us this time since from the very beginning Finnair lost one of our luggage (including crucial parts like the Sun server, camera mounts and calibration accessories) the first day arrive in New York, then in the venue a power accident occurred, around 220V voltage was wrongly fed to power line instead of 110V American standard voltage, and burned all our computer’s power supplies. All other electronic devices like ethernet switch, DECT transmitter, cameras were all affected by this power accident. Power supply replacements came one day after, and time was too limited for us to get the entire system ready for the first game so we have to give up the first game at 8am. Our opponent for the second game gave up the game because their equipments were lost. When we finally get our one of our new robot kicker work, we find our new software can not engage the kicker. It is a pity that no robot can kick, but luckily we get all our new robots ready assembled without kicker circuit connected before the last game. During the game with Wright Eagle from University of Science and Technology of China, we are able to play defence and blocked many opponent attacks, although we lost the game by 0:5 in the end but considering the opponent is very strong team and we don’t have any robot can kick.
05.07.2007
Today we have match with CMDragons from Carnegie Mellon University, from USA. CMDragons is the last year world champion, and perform even better this year. Like every other team, our team lost our game by 0:10. In the afternoon, we play again our old friend B-smart, which is from Bremen University from Germany. B-smart team is our partner team and we helped each other out a lot since we arrived in Atlanta. At begin of the game our vision system was not properly calibrated because of change of environment lighting. After first time out, B-smart made a goal. As we don’t have a kicker working, we can only play defending throughout the whole game. B-smart also suffered from some technical problems so we lost the game 0:3 in the end instead of 0:10 to our partner team. By losing this game, we are eliminated from the finals. It is sad to accept this fact, but we really learnt good lessons from our failures and knowing better that how to manage this project better in the future.