The first week is gone, and now is almost time to start… wait, I forgot something: why I am here, in the first place!
Well, let’s start again.
Hi everybody! Here it is you beloved Luca that is writing from Belfast, the main city of Ulster.
Since I am between two jobs (I love this, because it seems that I had a salary before and I will one after. The fact is that I did not see the former one and the latter, who knows…), I accepted the kind proposal of a professor to spend a period at the University of Ulster. So, here we are!
Filed under A week in Belfast, Photography, Real Life by on Aug 8th, 2010. Comment. 
RoboCup 2010 - The Final (copyright by Reuters)
Long time claimed, but impossible to demonstrate. With these words could have been described the goal scored by CHITA team to CMU (Carnagie Mellon).
Long story made short. During last RoboCup, in the match won by CMU, our team scored a goal from our half-field by using back-kick. The video is unavailable, inexplicably the CMU guy claimed: “I did not record that…”.
We believed that the proof of our moment of glory was gone forever, buried just in our memory.
But we believe in Internet! And, finally we have the proof!
“I’ve never seen back-kick scoring like this in real soccer,” he said after one of his robots found the net with a spectacular back-heel against a team from Carnegie Mellon University of the United States.
Read the complete article for discover the identity of the one!
(btw the source is reliable, is nevertheless the “Reuters“)
Filed under Citations, RoboCup by on Jun 28th, 2010. Comment.
The first day of the RoboCup 2010 is gone, and we are almost sleeping.
The code has still some problems, and some of them are critical for having good behaviour.
The “joint” part is not completely tested, but we are quite confident we will have good matches.
The hot is damn “hot”! For those of you that were in Osaka or Suzhou, the weather is like that. I will say that it is hotter than Osaka, but with this humidity is almost impossible to breathe.
We will start the official competition on Monday, and that means we have still time to be better!
Our first test against Nao Devils was quite a mess: the behaviour was ok, but it has a critical bug preventing a good playing.
We fixed this, so next time we will play better, but they can fix bugs too…
BTW, do not worry, I believe we can made it.. LA VINCIAMO!!!!
Now, it is time to go to bed… but stay tuned for another update tomorrow (if I will survive to the humidity…)
AH! For those of you are eager to know the results, point your browser here…
Let’s go win SPQR!
Filed under RoboCup by on Jun 19th, 2010. Comment.
Here we are… we packed everything, our code is on the svn, the shirts are printed and the robots are sleeping in the bags.
Our plane is scheduled at 15:30, so we are almost done with the time in the lab.
Well if you did not understood yet what I am talking about, we (SPQR) are leaving for the RoboCup 2010 in Singapore!
The schedule are already on the net, check it out here.
Now, I have a plane to catch, so… see you on the other side of the world!
Filed under RoboCup by on Jun 17th, 2010. Comment.
… we are choosing the new T-shirt design for the RoboCup!
This year the SPQR team will join the UChile team to become the “CHITA hominids”.
As you can wonder, CHITA comes from CHIle + ITAly = CHITA.
So… here it is the 2010 logo:
The CHITA RoboCup logo
As I was telling you before, this year design is based on this logo. The shirt will be by “Fruit of the Loom” like these.
There will be some change in the colour (last year we had red-shirt, but the ball is red too, so…) and here it is some draft.
Tips’n'tricks: for a larger view, click here 
Pick up your choice!
WARNING: there are two slightly different design: inset (D,H,I) and filled (the other). Vote your below (multiple choices are allowed)!
Loading ...Filed under Drawing, RoboCup, Technology by on May 29th, 2010. 3 Comments.
At last, today I’ve finished with a very stressful period of time (until the next one, of course…).
I’m in Istanbul, because of the OberSeminar 2010.
I did my presentation in the morning, and it was very good to have many question to have a feedback.
Istanbul is a beautiful city. We arrived yesterday, and we took just a little peek.
The skyline is full of spike like this:
The Istanbul skyline
Keep reading! Many wonderful picture inside!
Filed under Holiday, Photography by on Apr 14th, 2010. Comment.
Unbelievable…
It seems people at Google completely lost their mind. They just changed the name of the company in Topeka.
Google goes Topeka
Why such thing? Well, they launched a fiber optics experiment, and Topeka changed its name in March as “Google, Kansas, the capital city of fiber optics“.
So, it seems they did a surprise to us, but I guess that people there they have their reason. Maybe, there are also some hidden reason here what it the day today?, but who knows what will happen in the future.
As the time goes by, we will see if Google Topeka will be right!
Let’s go Topeka then!
Filed under Google, Technology by on Apr 1st, 2010. Comment.
… SPQR!!!
I know, this is what you wanted to be true. But it is not, sorry.
The real winners are Los Hidalgos, a very good Spanish team.
A key moment of the Open finals
What happen to the SPQR team? Well, the first two matches were quite bad, bad colour calibration, bad behaviours and some integration trouble.
The last one was actually quite good. Everything we developed so far was integrated and working. The colour calibration was redone and the overall behaviour was somehow the expected one.
Unfortunately we lost at the penalty kicks: our robot reached the ball, but for a bug in the code never kicked the ball.
Too bad for a team that worked every day trying to do its best. The newcomers were a little bit frustrated by this debacle, but I know that this could be a chance to do a better job.
And there will be a good occasion to prove our value very soon: our team will participate to the 1st RoboCup Tournment in Greece, held on May.
Thus, fellas, let’s back to work and let’s win the prize!
Filed under Real Life, RoboCup, Technology by on Mar 20th, 2010. Comment.
Since the organization seems to be sluggish, here it is the official schedule (the complete round robin combinations are below):
Thursday 18th
- 9:00 – 9:30 Opening ceremony
- 10:00 – 11:00 Practice matches for TV
- 11:00 – 12:00 Practice matches for schools
- 15:00 – 18:00 Round robin
Friday 19th
- 10:00 – 11:30 Round robin
- 12:00 – 14:00 Lunch time
- 14:00 – 15:00 Round robin
Saturday 20th
- to be decided: Semi-finals
- to be decided: Finals
- 12:30 Ending ceremony
The teams were grouped in these pools:
| Pool A | Pool B | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| A1 | Nao Team Humboldt  | B1 | SpiTeam  |
| A2 | MetroSpelBots  | B2 | SPQR (Cheetah)   |
| A3 | Kouretes  | B3 | Les Trois Mousquetaires (L3M)  |
| A4 | Austrian-Kangaroos  | B4 | Los Hidalgos |
Finally, here there are the round robin:
| Date | Cyan | Magenta | Referees |
|---|---|---|---|
| Th. 15:00 | A1 | A2 | B2-B3 |
| Th. 15:30 | B1 | B2 | A1-A2 |
| Th. 16:00 | A3 | A4 | B1-B2 |
| Th. 16:30 | B3 | B4 | A3-A4 |
| Th. 17:00 | A1 | A3 | B3-B4 |
| Th. 17:30 | B1 | B3 | A1-A3 |
| Fr. 10:00 | A2 | A4 | B1-B3 |
| Fr. 10:30 | B2 | B4 | A2-A4 |
| Fr. 11:00 | A4 | A1 | B2-B4 |
| Fr. 11:30 | B4 | B1 | B4-B1 |
| Fr. 14:00 | A2 | A3 | B4-B1 |
| Fr. 14:30 | B2 | B3 | A2-A3 |
I will keep you posted about the results. Hope to see there!
Filed under Real Life, RoboCup, Rome by on Mar 18th, 2010. Comment.
