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Latin American Robotics Competition - October 2008 - Salvador, Brazil,

An update of our approach is available in our Team Description Paper, October 17, 2008.

Competition code

At the Latin American Robotics Competition the Joint Rescue Forces will compete remotely. Our code is available in the Downloads section.

Results

We won the first prize, by exploring 141 and 175 m2 fully autonomously. Detailed results can be found here. Photos and videos will come available on the Latin Open site

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RoboCup - July 2008 - Suzhou, China

Our approach is best described in our Team Description Paper, June 9, 2008.

Conclusion: 7th place!

Final placing not as high as hoped, but an excellent learning experience and we're looking forward already to next year.

Day 5: July 19 — Second Proper Points Run

Spawned 3 P2ATs in an outdoor environment. Very unfortunately, the GUI became completely unresponsive after 10 minutes. Since it was running in Debug mode, it was possible to step out of some functions and kill some threads, and it came back. But the map was very small:

Day 4: July 18 — First Proper Points Run

Spawned 3 P2ATs in an indoor environment. Covered a significant amount of terrain and did not crash any robots. Three robots definitely perform better than four (esp. if they all run on different machine from GUI). The map:

Day 4: July 17 — First Points Run (though it was eventually decided that points for this run don't count)

Spawned four P2ATs in an outdoor environment: load was a bit too much! Lost control of the GUI and 3 out of 4 crashed fairly quickly. Lost control of the 4th after 15 minutes. Overall, a slightly disappointing run. The maps:

First run
Second run

Day 3: July 16 — Preliminary Run

Completed a prelim run in the Mapping world:


Conclusions:

• Need to debug connections — two robots were kicked off the WSS (though mysteriously one reconnected)
• Must debug apriori loading!
• Determined why multi-view isn't working for image capture: no multi-view object existed in my testing maps, and needed to make a change in the USARBot.ini file.
• Result was ok: second most area covered of all teams. Although, multiple teams experienced bugs.

Day 2: July 15 — Test Run

Test runs already completed yesterday. More work on image capture, see for example the following screenshot:


Also, today the schedule for the competition has been posted.
Made a run through the rough-terrain tunnel of the Mapping arena:

Day 1: July 14 — Setup

Setup was fairly straightforward. Connected fine, made some minor bug-fixes to allow ConservativeTeleOp and Map Saving. Progress by Arnoud on OmniCam and by Julian on image capture. An example test-run in the Mapping arena:

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German Open - April 2008 - Hannover, Germany

At the German Open in April 2008, UvA Rescue reached the final, placing second.