Not at all!

A lot of tension is gone now...

which seems to make me blog a lot less frequently.

Status is that we just finished our Demo Challenge and opened a door two times with Lisa.

Beside an almost unnoticeable issue (with the handle) and a short starting delay.

Also it seems like there is an upcomming and slowly growing dislike towards team Nimbro in our team as it seems like they are getting points while accomplishing not much more then the other teams.

I for my own start to like the robot "Jenny" of the team b-it-bots more and more. It's not like it does a lot as for it just turned indefinitly in the Demo Challenge no... it's more the way the team interacts with the robot and also that the robot reacts accordingly.

Speaking with it seems too work in a more natural way and not just parsing speech in to a text and checking for a few command words.

Jenny reacts to commands like "No" but they also say "Jenny, not at all" very often to stop the robot from what it is doing. I wonder if there is an reward system behind it that rewards the robot for right tasks and punishes it for wrong ones.

It always feels like the team is trying too teach a little child to do something.

I hope i can get myself together to have a little chat with them later... or tomorrow.

Follow Me! Hurry Up!

Emergency just finished! And it went pretty smart beside people unable to understand what Lisa wants from then.

Interessting was that she kinda repeated the phrase "Follow Me - Hurry Up" endless times. She were able to lead two people out of the building. First rough calculation summed up a full 1000 points for us! I wonder how well the others will do as the overall tasks looked pretty simple.

Only downside was that Lisa wasn't able to save the map as she didn't got to leave the arena. Very sad because there was a looping timer that would have saved the map all 30 seconds but it needed to be removed shortly before the game.

CleanOver

CleanUp is over!

We got onto the second place... with all other teams except Nimbro. Sad fact is that everyone on the second place got zero points only.

But before you ask what the heck happend let me tell you a little bit more about it.

CleanUp only rewards delivered objects with 1000 points. So you have to deliver an object before penalities kick in.

We were one out of 3 robots (counted without Cosero) that even grasped an object! Sadly it was a little fake flower object with a very tiny pot. Lisa gripped it correctly and then drop it because her gripper was fully closed what made her unable to detect the resistance of the object. But she named the flower correctly what tells us that her recognition worked correctly.

That was so far the good part about it.

The bad part is actually pretty bad and i minor.

Lisa attempt after the "failed" gripping to go for a coke bottle on the same piece of furniture. Sadly she was too close to the fridge and her arm hit it while she tryed another gripping action.

That was it almost. We gone for another try but the robbie katana driver didn't started up fast enough. Overall a know problem why we created a ros node for it that was easy to restart. Sadly exactly that node seemed to fail at arm movement planning since yesterday.

Feel free to think what you want!

See ya,

-Arc.

Tasty Testing

First more or less officals.

CleanUp got tested... a lot. The small object detection is blocking our pathfinding and makes Lisa moving backwards.

Also everything is recognized as "sponge" so far. This will be overwritten as soon as it hits 11:20 am. 20 more minutes to test the recognition and if we were able to fix the small object detection... if not... well then we probably grip an object an throw it on the ground later. Which could give us at least some mercy points.

If we get it too work we probably have real chances and (with luck) be able to retrieve 1 to 3 objects.

That would be more then lovely.

(Off to listen to some music before the actions start.)

Cheers!

-Arc.

Start of the End

Today is the big day!

Not for the team... but for me. It's my game that will try to work today.

My team mate is currently fixing some focus points for the destinations.

Emergency is currently tested in the arena and i don't know when we can test some more before we have the game. If he isn't done till 10 i will kick him out of the arena and test the hell out of it.

Too many changes right so close to the start...

Reminds me...

I know a little cave... not far from here but hidden behind the hills in a forest and just before you reach it's entrance while walking through the woods... there is a place filled with rays of light that made there way through leaves lighting up that a shrub.

This shrub only holding a single flower hidden there... reminds me sometimes... of...

Too bright to be dark

Okay here is an small correction.

We didn't left Cocktail Party with zero points... No we got 250 for learning in a single person!

Thats at least better then nothing but the others didn't done that bad at Cocktail Party as well.

Also CleanUp still makes problems. We now recognize objects (more or less percise but this recognizing wrong still leaves it by 400 points for that object) but the framework crashes completly. My teammate had a clue were to search for the bug and it is probably fixed pretty soon. If nothing goes wrong we should be able to retrieve full 3 or (if we are fucking lucky) even more objects! 3 objects would already be 3000 points if we did it right or 1200 if we do everything wrong (beside gripping plain air, chair legs or other evil fails of evil).

Another hurdle would be recognizing a wrong room name.

So lets prepair for the worst and hope for the best!

-Arc.

No Hopes to Destroy

So here i am again - reporting.

I'm kinda surprised that Cocktail Party got us another zero points. I didn't really expected that... maybe it was because the person responsible was very nervous.

Lisa entered the arena were able to learn in one person and then stucked for the rest of the game with a little odd navigation here and there.

I don't think we will be able to the "perfect" placement anymore... even if we would get good ratings on all the remaining games. It would need us to perform pretty well while all other would do horrible.

Next game will already be mine. And i feel a little pressured by the amount of points we need so bad now.

At least i should get to intense testing with Lisa now. I spend the time the robot was blocked by attenting to the games to document CleanUp as good as possible and also deleted unused and unneeded lines.

What ever happen students after me will have the luck to have good (thats what i hope at least) commented code.

On the bright side i found my earphones again and have my favored music.

I should probably eat something soon...

More later or tomorrow. Wish me luck,

-Arc.

Followed by Fail

Follow Me was an desaster!

Still we did better then at least one team before us! On the first try the robot didn't even moved on the second we were able to follow the operator but lost him a moent later for apparently no reason.

This kinda confirms my worries i had earlier. They said it would probably work if they would restart it again but i seen there tests and it always seem to be throwing a dice. And even if that would have worked... I'm pretty sure we would have lost the operator as soon as someone would have crossed the path between the operator and the robot.

So all in all 0 points! Cocktail Party is next.

I don't expect everything to work well there... but i don't think it will be as desasterous as Follow Me was.

Chances for Viktors dream (1-3 place at the RoboCup) to become true... probably still 90% the other teams don't seem to perform too well as well. Become first? I don't know... i guess that chances are already below 70%.

So far for the bad news.

The good news are that i fixed loading the Objects for CleanUp, so we should at least be able to match them and bring them to the right location. Katana... still worried about that part... last thing? Make starting the modul as easy as possible! One click => everything loaded accordingly.

I hope i can do that.

Also fixed the broken focus point for the start position.

TODO's for today:

• Create a map for CleanUp.
• Include the SpeechRec into the Start Button if possible.
• Learn in all the Objects!
• Get enough sleep...

See ya at the next post!

RoboCup starts in 1 hour. We still see to have a good bunch of bugs in the later games, but i'm convinced that RIPS will work without minor issues.

Following seems to lose the desired Person or stops moving from time to time. But as i wasn't involved in it developent i have no idea if those issues are minor. They seem to be at least.

Cocktail Party will be the next game after RIPS we will attend to. Lets hope the light environment will be good enough to allow more or less percise object recognition. The objects we are learned in yesterday were of bad quality due to the dim light we had at the evening. We learning them in again right at the moment.

I wonder if we will have all the items for CleanUp ready - tomorrow at 12 am. It's only 25 hours away now. We just coded in a new bug the other day and hopefully have fixed it by now. Not sure... we didn't got to test it by now because the other "subteams" are of course testing there own games that will be ...

(testing cleanUp opportunity interruption)

It's now 8 minutes before 12.

Seems like we have a minor issues with gripping objects with the katana arm.

(emergency interrupt: delivering checklist for RIPS via Laptop)

 Planning to an object with the katana arm doesn't seem to work. First cloues are that it is inhibited by the new katana ros node we implemented months ago. There are probably some unsynchronized state changes that get messed up in the cross framework conversation.

So far so long!

We are now official registrated and passed RIPS as the first team. Also the teams after us seemed to have a few issues, so we should be good for the moment.

But there is no time to rest especially not with some heavy bugs like the katana arm.

Till later, -Arc.

All I wanted was to bring enlightment...

So thats what happens if you try out something new.

One of our girls had huge difficulties to merge with my pretty new branch...

*sighs*

And i was so proud for being so smart and applying risky changes to a save location.

Seems it is to difficult and too new to everyone for being used right now. I needed to kill my little branchy right when it popped into existence... i feel like i lost something. At least i lost everything i did today.

I...

... i wish i could do something different. And i almost felt comfy working with the rest of this. And now i don't know anymore... maybe i can find some reassurance in my other childs.

I feel a little better since the lady at the wurst stand said: "And for the lady..."

Arrival

So there we are in Madgeburg!

Seems like there are enough rooms and i even got one for my own. Buying food for tomorrow ended up being a total chaos and i don't think we will ever be able to backtrack who spend how much money there...

There is also that joke where Raphael ask who will win the roboCup and we answer "Nimbro".

We will go to town at 8 pm which means in 7 minutes.

Not sure what else to say beside that i have no idea were the stuff i bought went and that i'm kinda worried about not having enough time to program.

Stay weird, Arc.