We spent Saturday morning and afternoon on the 15th demonstrating robotic technology at the University's homecoming events. It was a great afternoon outside, and everybody seemed to enjoy themselves. Thanks to the public for their interest and the students for volunteering their time!
The Winnipeg Free Press took a nice photograph for their Sunday edition.
The hats used to identify the robots are a little larger than the Citizen microrobots, but the low resolution of the the firewire cam we brought with us made a larger hat size necessary.
A gallery and videos can be found in the appropriate section of the website, and a paper presented at the robotics workshop here is in the publications section.
Update: we won a technical merit award from AAAI for this work
A combination of our efforts in interesting applications for the microrobots (robot pac-man), development of infrastructure for the microrobots (a series if games and an educational process for using them with undergraduate students) and our efforts at playing robotic soccer left us in third place in the world in the microrobot league. Thanks to all the students in the lab who did not go to RoboCup, as well as the students who did, and to those who have provided our robocup finding: The Faculty of Science, the Department of Computer Science, and the University of Manitoba.
Blitz, Buster, the Citizen robots (all described in items below), and ourselves are now at RoboCup. The next two days are prep-days, and competitions begin after that. Thanks for everybody's well-wishes for the competition! We will be updating a gallery and a video directory for RoboCup-2007 as time permits. Some initial items are there now - see the appropriate menu item on the left.
Scoring a goal against Iran in the Citizen Robot Soccer Competition