First order of business after arriving: food. The last two times I was there as a poor student, we never splurged on food, but now as working professionals, I can! Frog legs? Okay.

With the Eurocup games being hosted in France and the terrorist attacks that happened in Paris, there were soldiers on the street in just about every place with crowds. If any terrorist attacks were to happen in Paris, it wouldn’t be during the Eurocup games.

Later that night, we met up with one of our friend’s coworkers for dinner. Time for more food. Escargot? Okay.

Beef tartare? Okay. We all had one for ourselves, and if anything bad were to happen, there was only one washroom in our AirBnB. Would have been game over.

The next day, we went to Versailles. Instead of taking pictures of things, I played Pokemon Go instead. It had just launched in USA, and since I had an account from that launch, I got to play. Everywhere I went, there was Pokemon. Never mind that it was a blazing hot day without much shade in the palace gardens. Gotta catch’em all. It was Pokemon Go everywhere I went – there’s even an arena at the Arc de Triomphe.

Make Napoleon great again!

After all the walking around, it was time for more food. Foie gras this time.

The next day was a trip to the catacombs and saw the skeletal remains of a lot of dead people.

And also visited a famous dead guy: Napoleon.

After that, it was time to go to the fan zone at the Eiffel Tower to watch France VS Portugal. All these people are trying to get in through the many entrances. The police guarding the gate were letting women and children go in without lining out while everyone else had to. Chivalry is alive and well in France.

After a long while of waiting we got in. There were so many people walking on the gravel road that it kicked up so much dust everywhere and it was hard to breathe and I was coughing every few minutes. It wasn’t comfortable at all. There were long lineups everywhere and nowhere to sit. But the atmosphere was really good. Lots of cheering and anticipation for a France win.

A friend of ours, who was coming from another location came too late and couldn’t get into the fan zone to meet up with us. After a grueling ordeal of deciding whether or not to stay or go, we left and watched the game from a small restaurant near our AirBnB.

After Portugal won, people still cheered in the streets and set up firecrackers and stuff. I couldn’t have imagined what it would have been like if France won. All the France fans would have lost their shits and the streets would have been even more rowdy.

The next day, it was time to fly back home, thus ending my 3rd European adventure.

Link to photo album: here

There is a Uniqlo here! I wish I got paid to say this, but it’s the greatest clothing chain in existence.

Gotta love these Bierbikes rolling down the street.

Our main reason to come here was join in on the party that is the Eurocup. A giant screen was set up at the Brandenburg Gate just to show the games. We stuck around to watch Poland play against Portugal!

The weirdest part, that before the game started, they did Kiss Cams, which was fine, but they did this with straight men too… shudder

These people know how to chill.

We met some of my friend’s German friends and they took us to a warehouse that was converted into a bar with a giant screen just to watch Germany VS Italy. According to them, going to that place to watch the game has brought them “good luck” when they went to see Germany VS Brazil in 2014. Definitely one of the greatest games of Football I’ve seen – what a close game between Germany and Italy with a 6-5 Germany win after a penalty shootout.

And of course, when in Germany…

Link to photo album: here

My computer specifications:

• Intel Core i5-4570
• 16 GB Memory
• Radeon HD 5770

I followed the instructions here, with these changes:

• Using video driver “fglrx-updates” (the tutorial talks about NVIDIA cards)
• Did not install TuxLoL
• Did not do anything regarding the “Maestro error” since it only applies to Optimus Notebook users
• Did not follow step 6 because I did not run into the problem for big item icon text for the item shop
• EDIT: Thanks to Ingvar’s comment, the installation progress for the game can be viewed like so: open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and execute:

tail -f ~/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/LeagueOfLegends/drive_c/Riot\ Games/League\ of\ Legends/Logs/Patcher\ Logs/*.log

There are also other steps that I had to do, which I read from here:

• Click configure for the “League of Legends” entry in “PlayOnLinux” and find the “Display” tab and then choose the following options:
  • Direct Draw Renderer – gdi
  • Video memory size – 4096 (or something else depending on graphics card)
  • Offscreen rendering mode – fbo\0
  • Everything else on default
• Create a file called “game.cfg” in the directory “/home/your-username-here/PlayOnLinux’s virtual drives/LeagueOfLegends/drive_c/Riot Games/League of Legends/Config”. Below is what I have in my “game.cfg”:

[General]
EnableAudio=1
GameMouseSpeed=10
UserSetResolution=1
BindSysKeys=0
SnapCameraOnRespawn=0
OSXMouseAcceleration=1
AutoAcquireTarget=0
EnableLightFx=0
WindowMode=0
ShowTurretRangeIndicators=0
PredictMovement=0
WaitForVerticalSync=0
Colors=32
Height=1080
Width=1920
SystemMouseSpeed=0
CfgVersion=5.3.296
x3d_platform=1

[HUD]
CameraLockMode=0
MiddleClickDragScrollEnabled=0
KeyboardScrollSpeed=0.5000
ChatScale=50
ObjectTooltips=0
AutoDisplayTarget=0
ShowAllChannelChat=1
ShowTimestamps=1
ItemShopPrevY=39
ItemShopPrevX=106
NameTagDisplay=1
ShowChampionIndicator=0
ShowSummonerNames=1
ScrollSmoothingEnabled=0
MiddleMouseScrollSpeed=0.5000
MapScrollSpeed=0.5000
ShowAttackRadius=0
NumericCooldownFormat=1
SmartCastOnKeyRelease=0
EnableLineMissileVis=0
FlipMiniMap=1
ItemShopResizeHeight=0
ItemShopResizeWidth=164
ItemShopPrevResizeHeight=1080
ItemShopPrevResizeWidth=1920
ItemShopItemDisplayMode=1
ItemShopStartPane=1

[Performance]
CharacterInking=1
ShadowsEnabled=1
EnableHUDAnimations=0
PerPixelPointLighting=0
EnableParticleOptimizations=0
BudgetOverdrawAverage=0
BudgetSkinnedVertexCount=0
BudgetSkinnedDrawCallCount=0
BudgetTextureUsage=0
BudgetVertexCount=0
BudgetTriangleCount=0
BudgetDrawCallCount=0
EnableGrassSwaying=0
EnableFXAA=0
AdvancedShader=0
FrameCapType=6
GammaEnabled=0
Full3DModeEnabled=0
AutoPerformanceSettings=0
CharacterQuality=4
EffectsQuality=4
EnvironmentQuality=4
ShadowQuality=4
GraphicsSlider=6
paths=0

[FloatingText]
EnemyTrueDamageCritical_Enabled=1
EnemyMagicalDamageCritical_Enabled=1
EnemyPhysicalDamageCritical_Enabled=1
TrueDamageCritical_Enabled=1
MagicalDamageCritical_Enabled=1
PhysicalDamageCritical_Enabled=1
Countdown_Enabled=0
EnemyTrueDamage_Enabled=0
EnemyMagicalDamage_Enabled=0
EnemyPhysicalDamage_Enabled=0
TrueDamage_Enabled=0
MagicalDamage_Enabled=0
PhysicalDamage_Enabled=0
Score_Enabled=0
QuestComplete_Enabled=0
QuestReceived_Enabled=0
Disable_Enabled=0
Level_Enabled=0
Dodge_Enabled=0
Heal_Enabled=0
Special_Enabled=0
Invulnerable_Enabled=0
Debug_Enabled=0
Absorbed_Enabled=0
OMW_Enabled=0
EnemyCritical_Enabled=0
MagicCritical_Enabled=0
Critical_Enabled=0

[Volume]
SfxVolume=0.5
MasterVolume=0.5

Let’s Cross The Street… Diagonally!

This is no surprise really. There are lots of people in Tokyo. The crazy thing is that at the Shibuya crossing, the lights for cars can be red at the same time for all directions, and allows pedestrians to cross the intersection in any direction they want.

Their Metro System Is Complicated

That picture there shows only the metro lines operated by the JR Railway Company. There is another set that is run by other companies such as the Tokyo Metro Company. Route planning apps save the day!

Nintendo Is Big Around Here

Akihabara has many shops that sell used gaming consoles like Gameboys, Super Nintendos, and N64’s. They even sell tons of used games for them too. I managed to pick up a used copy of Tetris DS before I left.

I Finally Played TGM3 at the Arcade

TGM3 is a Japanese variation of Tetris that is designed to be very very hard (see this). The video starts getting crazy at about 3 minutes and becomes completely insane at about 5:08. Ever since playing lots of Tetris during my undergrad and learning about this game, I finally got the chance to play this at the arcade and not on an emulator. This was at HEY (Hirose Entertainment Yard) in Akihabara.

People Still Like Pokemon

I don’t think kids today in North America still watch Pokemon, but in Japan it’s still popular – popular enough for Pokemon themed stores.

Japanese War History

Yasukuni Shrine is a shrine that commemorates those who died serving the Empire of Japan. Some of these commemorated people happen to be considered war criminals, where 14 of them are A-Class war criminals, which makes this place quite controversial. It was reported that Shinzo Abe, as the Prime Minister of Japan, visited this shrine, which angered the governments of China and Korea. Near the shrine itself, there is a museum that chronicles Japanese war history, known as the Yushukan, where visitors can see various relics and artifacts from the different wars that Japan has been involved in.

The Future Is Here

The Miraikan, also known as the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, displays the latest cutting-edge technology from Japan. Asimo, the Honda Robot is one of the main attractions here, as well as the display of humanoid android robots (like the picture below).

Odaiba, A Less Busy Part of Tokyo

Odaiba is an artificial island in Tokyo Bay, and has lots of attractions like scenery, museums (like the Miraikan), shopping, and amusement parks (like Legoland and Joypolis).

Lots of Temples and Shrines

Tokyo has no shortage of temples and shrines. The Sensoji Temple in Asakusa is among the famous ones. To me it is that Japan is to temples and shrines as Europe is to churches and cathedrals.

Scenery at High Places

Tokyo Skytree is the tallest structure in Japan and features an observation deck that allows visitors to see the surrounding area. I felt my ears popping as the elevator took me to the top because of the sheer height of the building. At the observation deck, there are touch screens that give information on various landmarks that can be seen. On a clear day, it is possible to see Mount Fuji from here.

For Collectors of Figurines

The Akihabara Radio Hall has a collection of stores with lots and lots of figurines from various anime series. Other stores even sell models of tanks, battleships, etc. There was one in particular that sold giant models from blockbuster Hollywood movies like Robocop, Batman, and Terminator. Would have liked to take a better picture, but they had a strict no photography policy.

WTF

It’s true. Japan has lots of weird stuff. That picture below is for a place called the Robot Restaurant. It’s hard to explain. It’s better to watch this (it starts off pretty weird and just gets weirder).

Links to more photos:

• Tokyo
• Akihabara
• Asakusa
• Yasukuni Shrine
• Odaiba
• Tokyo Skytree

Looking back, I should have used a book like the “UnrealScript Game Programming Cookbook” by Dave Voyles.  This book is directed towards audiences who have never touched Unreal programming before.  However, it does require readers to have some familiarity with general object oriented programming knowledge.

This book in particular follows a recipe-based approach for teaching the basics of Unreal programming and covers the core topics in programming for UDK.  The recipes are designed to be basic in order to give learners good exposure without too much of a knowledge dump.  Some may argue that having a recipe-based approach doesn’t teach people how to synthesize solutions for themselves.  I see recipes as a good stepping stone.

This book is not meant to teach you everything there is to know about UDK, but enough for people to get started with a good foundation to learn off of.  From the book, I would have liked to see more details about the nuances of the UnrealScript language, as well as a more big picture view of how all the different topics illustrated in the book fit together – perhaps a chapter dedicated to that.  The way it is organized right now is that the big picture is explained, but the explanations are scattered throughout the book.  I am someone who much prefers a more top-down approach on topics like this.

In any case, this book is still a great resource for learning Unreal programming and I would recommend it to people who would like to start their learning adventure in UDK.  Here is a sample chapter of the book for those who are curious in seeing for themselves what this book has to offer (here).  For more information about the book, click here.

We had spent a whole year upgrading everything.  I designed a new ball kicking system that was more durable, more maintenance free, and more powerful than the year before.  The other mechanical systems were more robust as well.  The electrical system also had a huge upgrade.  Burning and smoking electrical boards were a thing of the past!  We have never had a design this robust – ever!

What is RoboCup?

For those who don’t know what RoboCup is, RoboCup is an international robotics competition aimed to further robotics research.  Their long-term goal is to have robots beat the World Cup Soccer team winners by 2050. There are various leagues within RoboCup, such as in robotic soccer (where we participate), home care, rescue, simulation, etc.  Our team, the UBC Thunderbots, compete in the small-size soccer league, which is probably has the fastest game play of all the different leagues.  The robots are generally cylinders with a diameter of about 18 cm and a height of 15 cm.  They can move at around 4 m/s and kick a golf ball at 8 m/s.

One of the other leagues, the Standard Platform League competes with standardized robots for all teams and the key difference between each is the software that is written for the robots.

Another league, the mid-size league in RoboCup Soccer competes with robots that are about a 1/3 of the size of a person. The game isn’t as quick as the small-size league game and they play with a real soccer ball instead of a golf ball. During the competition, it gathered quite the crowd too.

Preparing for the Games

Most teams arrived at the venue when it opened to get to work right away. Everybody wanted their robots in tip-top shape. Our team did the same. Even though our robots were ready mechanically and electrically, the key game changer was seeing which team had better artificial intelligence for their robots. Whenever got time to test on the field, we took advantage of it to make sure our AI was working well too.

Round Robin

In the round robin stage, each team gets four games against other teams in their bracket. Each bracket is made up of five teams and the skill level is spread out based on the rankings of the previous year.

We lost our first two games against a team called KIKS from the Toyota National College of Technology in Japan, and a team called STOx’s from the Universidad Santo Tomás in Colombia. In both of those games, we were simply outplayed because the other team had better software than we did. At the end of the game against the Japanese team, I spoke a bit of my horrible Japanese to them and they were super surprised and impressed that I knew a bit of Japanese!

Because our robots were finished not long before the competition began, the software team did not get a chance to test the code that was written, and so we found out the problems during the competition. Our robots were never able to drive up to a ball and take possession of it. The robots somehow always missed the ball. When the robot had the ball, it didn’t know what to do with it. It sat there holding onto the ball doing nothing. This was so frustrating for our team and even more so for the software team who wished they had more time to test.

We won our next two games against two lower tier teams. One is called RoboFEI, from the Centro Universitário da FEI in Brazil, and a team called RFC Cambridge from Harvard and MIT. It’s nice to be able to say that we beat a team from these two ivy league schools. Looks good when we look for sponsors too!

Lucky Loser Round

Because we had a 2-2 record during the group stage, we played a fifth game, the so-called Lucky Loser Round, to see if we could qualify for the quarter finals. Our match up was against a team called ODENS from the Osaka Electro-Communication University in Japan.  The game was so close that there was a dispute about the rules and whether what our team did was legitimate. Because our robots were not able to move up to a ball and shoot it at the net during the shootout, the referee introduced a workaround that the other team disputed.

Our referee’s native tongue was Portuguese, we spoke English, and the other team spoke Japanese. I didn’t know enough Japanese to translate. Eventually, members from other teams like the Thai and Chinese team came to help with the dispute. During the discussion that took about an hour, I heard people speak English, Japanese, Portuguese, Thai, Japanese, and Mandarin all at the same time. It seemed like nobody had the full picture of what was happening and how to resolve it.

The dispute was resolved when both teams agreed to a specific workaround that made it possible for our robots to do shootouts.  The game ended with a shootout and we lost on the very last shot of the shootout unfortunately. We almost made it to 8th place.  Still, achieving 9th place out of 22 teams was the best that the team has ever done before.

The Competition Ends

Skuba, from Kasetsart University in Thailand, had won the competition for four years in a row since 2009, but this year they had a surprising finish that was not even the top 4.  The second place team, ZJUNlict from Zhejiang University in China had beat them early in the quarterfinals.  ZJUNlict’s strongest opponent this year was CMDragons, from Carnegie Mellon University in USA.  In the final round, they were tied for the entire game and the game went to shootouts where CMDragons lost by one goal.  ZJUNlict had made first place in the RoboCup 2013 in the Small Size League.

As the competition came to a close, we said goodbye to the people on other teams that we met and as a parting gift from the German team ER-Force, they gave us a German flag with the names of all their team members signed onto it, with the message, “for our amazing friends, the Thunderbots, from team ER-Force”.

I realized now that the competition is over, I probably wouldn’t be going to competitions in the future because I’ve graduated from university. It made me feel a little bit sad that I couldn’t compete anymore, but at least I can still help out the team wherever they need it.

Link to photo album here

This gave us a lot of opportunities to find out what was wrong with our robots before the real competition began. We found out that are mechanical and electrical systems were quite robust, while our software system was the weakest link of the three.

In the downtime, we were taken on a tour of the nearby Eichbaum Brewery. The tour was quite difficult to follow because it was pretty much all in German. Even though I had learned some German, it was still quite difficult for me to follow.

I had been to Mannheim before and both times I went to Mannheim before this time, I had a very negative experience. The first time, I got food poisoning (I still remember which restaurant it was), and the second time, my friends and I waited at the Mannheim train station for 4 hours for a train to Berlin with a scheduled departure time of 12am.

Having had lived in Germany before meant I recognized a lot of brands like food chains, department stores, cell phone companies, etc. Because of that, my teammates often asked me different things about Germany such as how German phone plans worked and how to sign up for a plan. I explained it to them and even asked the cashier at the supermarket who didn’t speak English about phone plans.

On another day, we were also taken on a tour to the nearby city of Heidelberg. I had also been here before and vaguely knew my way around. We hiked up to the castle again, but we were there in the evening so the inside of the castle was closed by the time we arrived, so we just went as high as we could.

After spending a few days in Mannheim, all three of the teams organized transportation together to Eindhoven, where the real competition would begin. The workshop allowed us to see what our robots were capable of and what we could improve on early, so that we would be better prepared for the real thing.

Link to photo album here

Personally, I simply got tired of sleeping so little.  I always sacrificed sleep for more work time in the past.  But now, I’ve come to realize how powerful being rested really is.  It feels so empowering when I wake up in the morning, fully refreshed.  I don’t have to struggle to get out of bed or set 5 alarm clocks to get me out of bed in the morning.  The reason that the struggle exists is because the body wants more sleep.  This is a clear sign of not sleeping enough.  I’m definitely no sleep expert and I don’t claim to be, but I thought I’d share some techniques in how to think differently about sleep.  But first, I think I should share my experience with sleep deprivation, which I felt heavily motivated me into adopting this way of life.  All of this below is just my view on sleep health.

My Battle with Sleep Deprivation

In high school, I pretty much got 8 hours of sleep a night.  It wasn’t that hard since at that time I didn’t really think about optimizing my sleep.  I just remember being nagged to go to sleep by my parents every night.  I never had to stay up doing any homework or anything like that.  Even my first year of university was like that.  Rarely found myself staying up to do work unless there was a exam the next day or something.

Second year of university is when it all changed.  A thought clicked in my head that I could sleep less and get more work done.  It’s not like I felt sleepy at night anyways.  For a while it was alright, but then as I slept less and less, my sleep debt accumulated.  I found myself napping in class.  I even micro-slept while I drove and almost got into not one, but a couple car accidents.  I didn’t try to do anything about it at the time.  I liked the extra time.  There was a while where I slept about 4.5 hours a night because I stayed up playing computer games.  I looked like a zombie.  I yawned all the time and everyone knew I was sleepy.

In my third year, I lived alone on campus.  No one told me when to wake up to go to class.  With all the sleep debt I had, I struggled to get up every morning.  Eventually, I stopped going to morning classes altogether and my grades suffered.  I started questioning myself, “why is it so hard to sleep early?”  I was easily annoyed all the time.  I was so tired at one point, that I caught myself hallucinating.  It was weird because I saw this strange bug crawling up the curtain and when I waved the curtain around, it was gone.  I couldn’t find it anywhere on the floor.  I wanted to change my sleeping habits, but I couldn’t do it.  Logic told me to do it, but I couldn’t act on it.

My sleeping habits didn’t change until I went to Germany for my co-op work term.  I guess because I was adjusting to this new environment, I actually felt sleepy at night.  This urge made me sleep a lot earlier than what I was used to doing.  I felt rested for the first time in a long time.  It felt so good.  My constant zombie look faded away.  I could tell that my skin complexion was improving.

I guess because I’ve seen how dangerous sleep deprivation could be, it finally compelled me to change my ways.  Ever since I’ve made sleep a priority, I feel a lot healthier.  I lose out on wake-time for working, but I am able to think better when I am rested.  My thoughts are a lot clearer.  That makes me a more efficient worker.

Getting into the Frame of Mind

You’ve got to be truly convinced that you want to get more sleep.  I know a lot of people who say things “yeah I know I don’t get enough sleep”, but they don’t do anything about it.  Nothing at all.  Everyday they keep their usual sleep routine and they’re struggling all the time.  They’re the ones who are always late to morning appointments, and some even for afternoon appointments.  Why does it have to be that way?  It doesn’t.  But before even trying to maintain a proper sleep routine, people really have to change the way they think about sleep.

Sleep is NOT a waste of time. I’ve heard people say, “sleep is a waste of time” or “sleep is for the weak”.  It definitely is not.  Somehow I think there is a competition between who gets the least amount of sleep and still gets the most work done.  I’ve heard people people saying (sometimes bragging) stuff like how they got only 3 hours of sleep and then pulled an all-nighter to study for an exam.  Sure, they definitely were up for a while, but should we question the efficiency of that work?  Of course.  Anybody who has pulled an all-nighter has experiences how “out of it” they were by the end if not half way through.  Nobody wants to do an all-nighter.  That is an extreme case though.  A more common theme is to stay up for 18 hours or so.  That leaves 6 hours to sleep.  The average for most people lies somewhere around 7.5-8 hours.  According to the statistics, more than half of us need more than 6.  By not getting our required amount of sleep, this so-called “sleep debt” will accumulate over time.  Like I mentioned before, I once slept on average 4.5 to 5 hours a night for about 3 months straight.  People around me could tell I looked like a zombie.  I’ve definitely experienced sleep debt first hand.  In retrospect, doing this was so stupid, but that experience definitely helped me reshape what I thought about sleep.  It is a necessity.

Getting into the right frame of mind takes time.  I definitely did not just one day choose to make sleep a priority.  It happened over time.  For me it took a few years in order for me to drill it into my head.  After sleeping late and waking up early, I’d ask myself why I did that.  Why did I sleep so little the night before when the consequence was me feeling sleep deprived the day after?  As I’m in my early 20’s, sleeping late is easy.  It’s not difficult to just stay up late doing nothing in particular.  In fact, it seems to be natural tendency for most people in my age group to be night owls.

Going to bed early is not a chore.  Chores are something we’d rather not do, but we’re only doing it because we have to.  This attitude will not work.  Eventually, you’ll give up and revert to your old ways.  You have to change your attitude toward sleep.  You know how some people feel passionate about their work and will always feel motivated to do it?  That’s their motivation.  There is a similar motivation for sleeping early.  I want to go to sleep early today, so I feel rested and ready to go tomorrow.

Ask yourself why your sleep habits are the way they are right now.  Why do I have to wake up feeling terrible every morning?  Why do I have to set so many alarms just to get out of bed?  Why am I pressing the snooze button so much?  Shouldn’t I be getting up super early? Doesn’t this struggle to wake up give me less time to get ready?  If I don’t have enough time to get ready, won’t I look like a mess when I go to work/school?  Am I sleeping late all the time because I have so much work to do?  Could I be improving on my time management to make me more efficient? Is sleeping late worth it?  I’m sure there are way more questions to be asked, but asking yourself these questions will tell you how you really feel about it.  Everyone’s going to have different answers.  Some might want to change, but others might feel that what they’re doing is the best solution right now.

The Bottom Line

Sleep is absolutely essential for good health and its benefits are far reaching.  Ever since I’ve slept better, I’ve been able to accomplish more.  No longer am I the sleep deprived zombie.  My grades in school are better despite harder courses and more commitments. Better sleep health is something that anybody can do, but they have to want it.  You have to convince yourself that sleep deprivation is a terrible thing and it is something to avoid.  You’ve got to get into the frame of mind that sleep health is good and the will to change.  If you truly want to improve your sleep habits for the better, the improvements will happen.

Flying to Mexico City

When we got to Dallas Airport, we had a stopover of few hours, so we decided to have some Texan steak – or at least as Texan as we tried to get without leaving the airport.  We ended up at TGI Fridays.  It was the first steak that I’ve had in a long time, and I definitely could use another one.  The steak even came with “Jack Daniel’s Sauce”, which made it that much better.

After eating, we met up with two others on the team who had flown from San Jose and Toronto.  After a four hour flight to Dallas, and other few hours of stopover there, we had to fly for another two and a half hours to get to Mexico City.

As my friend said, “it’s like China happened”.  The Benito Juárez International Airport was probably the most disorganized airport I’ve ever seen.  It’s as if every single flight landed at the same time.  The lineup to grow through customs took at least forty-five minutes.  During this whole time, everyone was tired and wanted get their sleep.  A lot of the people on the team hadn’t slept the night before (rather than sleep 2 or 3 hours to wake up early for the flight right?).  While in this lineup, we saw a couple of other RoboCup teams landing as well (Skuba, MRL, among others).  After finally getting through customs and a security check, we got a ride to our hostel via transportation that we organized with the hostel prior to our departure.

Hostel Mundo Joven Catedral

The hostel we stayed had very nice staff that really cared about making its guests feel safe there.  It’s a common feeling among travelers to think that Mexico City is definitely not one of the safer places to travel to.  To combat that, the hostel had its own security guards, security cameras, and they even called legitimate taxi’s for its guests.  They even told us which direction to walk when leaving the hostel to avoid going to the shadier parts of town.  Furthermore, it was situated in the historic center of Mexico City, within walking distance of the Metropolitan Cathedral of the Assumption of Mary of Mexico City and the Plaza de la Constitución.  From some of the rooms at the hostel, there was a nice view of the cathedral.

Work Day

We spent the next day working on the robots to make sure none of the mechanical parts had been affected during the flight from Vancouver.  We had packed all the robots in a regular suitcase with packing foam all around it to protect it.  Looking over the mechanical parts, everything was in order.  The main things we had to fix were tightening screws, adjusting the wiring etc.  The software team had very little to do because they’ve written all the code they could, and just needed robots to test with.  The electrical team on the other hand, toiled tirelessly to troubleshoot all the boards and make sure they were all functioning properly.

RoboCup Begins!

We arrived at the competition venue, the World Trade Center at 8 AM to find a slew of other teams patiently waiting to register.  After probably an hour long wait, we all finally moved in and set up our work places.  When we looked at the field the robots would be playing on, we noticed that the organizers hadn’t yet set up the cameras yet (required for the robots to “see” where they’re going).  This meant that no teams could test.  Teams that were ready could only wait until the organizers got those set up.  Because of this delay, the games had to be delayed as well.  This gave us more time to get the robots ready.  For the next little while, we were the first team to arrive and the last team to leave everyday.  The electrical team needed all the time they could get to finish everything.

Because we had already finished most our maintenance work the day before, there wasn’t a whole lot we could do.  The electrical team had to continue working on their stuff to get as many robots ready as possible.  For the next day and a half, we let the electrical team do their work and we’d help them along the way by replacing parts that were broken (encoders and such).  Otherwise, there wasn’t much we could help with.

Food for the next Week

When we got hungry during the competition, we did a little bit of exploration to find food.  Eventually, all the teams wound up at the same shopping mall for food.  There was a supermarket downstairs to buy water and a food court upstairs with a variety of foods.  We went to this mall pretty much everyday for as long as we were at the World Trade Center.  One day we’d try Mexican food, other days we’d try plain-old hamburgers and other days we’d try even Chinese food (at least the white person’s interpretation of it).  It wasn’t really healthy for us, but we figured it was only for a week.

For dinner, most teams ended up ordering pizza from the nearby Domino’s.  We ate it so much that everybody got sick of having pizza.  Sometimes, we’d have dinner with other teams at our hostel restaurant so we could get to know them a little bit better.  After all, the competition is more about mutual learning and robotics advancement rather than about winning.

Let the Games Begin

Because our team wasn’t that ready to begin with, we had to forfeit our first game against the Immortals from Iran.  By the time we got three robots up and running, we played against the RoboJackets from Georgia Tech.  They only fielded five robots out of the total six.  For most of the game, both teams played pretty evenly, despite their two-robot advantage.  All was going well until one of the opponent’s robots chipped the ball that hit the top of one of our robots, bounced off and rolled into the goal.  In that particular situation, the referee had called an “indirect free kick”, meaning the shot, even if it went in the net, would not count.  But unfortunately, that rule was not applicable because it hit off of another robot.  It was an unlucky goal for us, and we definitely could not score a goal to tie up the game.  We ended up losing one-nil.  For the next few days, we kept complaining about that goal.

In our third game, we played against RoboFEI from Brazil.  There were so many good scoring chances in this game from both our teams that made this game so intense.  Even though we were only watching machines play, everybody cheered them on.  We had four robots on the field this game and they all worked like a charm.  The mechanical system, electrical system, and the artificial intelligence worked so well together.  It was a great feeling for everyone on our team – to see our design work.  After almost a year of hard work, this was it.  We saw our robots move, intercept balls, shoot on the goal, etc.  A lot of the robot shortcomings from the North American Open were also dealt with, such as the problem of the break beam sensors not working, and the robot not moving accurately on the field.  When we scored, we cheered so loud that every single person in the room could hear us (there were probably about 1000 people in that room).  We all got an immense feeling of satisfaction in seeing our working robots score their first goal.  A few minutes later, the other team scored a goal.  It didn’t matter to us, we were still high in the clouds in terms of our mood.  The game ended 1-1.  Despite the tie game, everyone on the team was so happy in seeing our robots work, it didn’t matter what the result was.

This was a great morale boost for the team because for our forth and last game, we played against BRocks from Turkey.  This time, we had our full fleet of robots.  We played our first six on six game.  Yet again, we saw our robots work.  Nothing broke down during the game and everything just worked.  It was quite rare for us to just put our robots on the field and have nothing go wrong.  At one point, our robot shot the ball into the opposing robot and a piece fell off of it.  We knew our design worked when stuff like this happens.  This game was less intense for us than our previous game, but we did end up winning.  That put our record at 1 win, 1 tie, and 2 losses – a total of 4 points.  Unfortunately, this wasn’t enough for us to advance to the next round of the competition and as a result we finished 13th out of 20 teams in the league.  Not so bad for having zero working robots when we got to Mexico.

After the official games, we played a couple friendly games with other teams.  The first game we played was against the Mannheim Tigers.  The game was going well, until we found problems where some of the screws on the robot weren’t tightened sufficiently.  As a result, things well off the robot when we played.  It was quite embarrassing to see.  At least it was only  something minor like putting in a screw, and not something major like a design problem.  In our second friendly game, this time against ER-Force from Erlangen, we found some electrical parts frying randomly on the board, which wasn’t good either.  Out of six working robots, we now had three – still a net gain I guess.

After we were done playing, we watched the other teams play for first place.  From watching their games, it was clear that they played on a way higher level than we did.  Everything that their robots did were way better than ours.  Shooting was faster, chipping went further, robots moved faster, kicks were more accurate, etc.  Everything about their robots was just better.  There is definitely a lot we could learn from these teams.  The final winner of this year’s competition ended up being Skuba from Thailand, who beat ZJUNLict from China.  Both teams analyzed each others strategies for days, but only one team could come out on top.  And now for the fourth year in a row, Skuba remains the undefeated winner of the competition.

Other Leagues in RoboCup

During our idle time, we walked around the other rooms to see how the other teams were working.  RoboCup has many different competitions under its name, while our Small Size League competition is only one small part of it.  Leagues range from soccer robots, rescue, simulation, to even home care robotics.  In the home care robotics league, the competition involved a robotic navigating through a mock house to perform certain chores such as picking up objects to hand to people, speaking and hearing instructions, etc.  It was an admittedly difficult task to do for these robots, but many teams were quite successful at it.

Accidents Happen

Just like in the North American Open, there was yet again another accident involving batteries.  Except this time, nobody noticed and the whole battery lit up in flames.  Somebody just yelled “fire, fire!” and started trying to pat it down with something.  Knowing that I was too far away to do anything, I just took out my camera and snapped a picture of the whole thing.  Eventually, someone just poured lots of water over it to put our the fire.  In retrospect, that might not have been a good idea since water in an electrical fire is not really a good thing.  Nobody got hurt though, which is good.  Afterward, the organizers didn’t let us charge batteries nearby our work space anymore.

Some Design Shortcomings

Knowing that our ball kicker would be able to withstand impacts of the ball, what we had forgotten to analyze was how well the kicker would hold up if it hit a object fixed to the ground.  We found out the hard way at the competition after a few games when we discovered that our robot kicker head was bent out of shape.  We also had a lot of turf buildup inside the robot that was enough to slow down the wheel during the game.  This turf had to be cleaned out after every match.

For the kicking mechanism, the robot uses a solenoid/plunger mechanism.  Activating the coil would cause the plunger inside the core to move quickly to hit the ball.  A rubber band secured to the end of it would allow the plunger to return to its initial position.  The problem with this setup was that the rubber band would easily break and had to be replaced after every game.  When we took out the rubber band, we could always see cut marks along it.  In another instance, a chipper solenoid on a robot almost popped out.  It’s not really clear why this happened at all, but it could have been a screw that was not very tight to begin with.

RoboCup Closing

To close the competition, there was a soccer game where humans played against the middle size league robots.  It was pretty funny to see the robots struggle to take the ball away from people who could handle the ball way better.  At the same time, the humans were really scared of the robots since if a human ever got hit by the kicker head from the robot, it would break bones.  The robot goalie however, proved quite competent in blocking shots – better than the human goal from what I saw.  Or maybe the human goalie wasn’t trying very hard.  I’m not sure who won the game since I didn’t watch the whole thing, but it was still really interesting to see.

Afterward, all the teams packed up their things and waited for the closing banquet.  At the closing banquet, they served a standard meal for everyone.  It was a really good chance for teams to celebrate their achievements and finally relax a little bit after the competition.  Everyone deserved a rest after all of that.

First Real Tour of Mexico – Teotihuacan

After the competitions ended, most teams stayed an extra day or two to see the sights in Mexico City.  The organizers of the Small Size League were nice enough to organize a tour for everyone the day after the competition ended.  Most of the SSL teams went with us to the Aztec pyramids in Teotihuacan.  The tour first showed us how their predecessors used different plants and minerals to make tools such as knives and sewing thread.  That part was interesting at first, but I think what a lot of us really wanted to see were the pyramids.  Afterward, the tour guide led us to the gift shop.  For some reason, most of the people were so interested there, it took about an hour for everyone to finish so that we could move on with the tour.  After the gift shop, we finally made it to the pyramids.

After walking up and down the pyramids, we had lunch and went back to Mexico City to see the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe.  This was one of the most visited Catholic shrines in the world.  But because I had already visited so many churchs and cathedrals from my tour around Europe, this part of the tour was less interesting for me.

Historic City Center

The team would fly back to Vancouver on the day after visiting the pyramids.  But before leaving, we made sure to visit the Metropolitan Cathedral of the Assumption of Mary of Mexico City and the Plaza de la Constitución.  In the plaza, hung a giant flag of Mexico.  This is where the city center used to be, at least during the 19th century.

Going Home

After 10 days in Mexico, we all longed to go home.  It had been a long week – full of stress, adrenaline pumping excitement and overall a good experience.  But after all that, we were ready to go.  We flew out in the afternoon from Mexico City.  Apparently, at around the same time that we were at the airport in Mexico City, three cops had been shot to death.  While we were there though, we didn’t hear anything of it.  We safely arrived in Dallas for a brief stopover and arrived back in Vancouver at about 8:30 PM, just in time to go home, wash up and go to bed.

More photos here

Beginning of the Competition

On the first day of the competition, there was a work day for all the teams to use to get their robots ready again after a long flight to Canada.  As the current mechanical team lead for the Thunderbots, I too had to get our own robots ready to play.  The mechanical systems had already been completed some weeks ago, but unfortunately, even now, the electrical board testing and firmware coding still had not been completed yet and some parts that we needed were still not in.  For the next day and a half, the team was scrambling to get everything finished in preparation for the first game on Sunday.  Because, the only critical tasks remaining were the electrical testing and coding, only the electrical team had the know-how to tackle those tasks.  The mechanical and software teams could only wait for results.  As the electrical team worked, everybody else on the team became more and more stressed.  We all kept wondering whether the team would have working robots for the first game.  We were all helpless in this situation.  The electrical team worked throughout the day and night trying to finish.  Some of the other team members stayed in anticipation while others went home to rest hoping for results in the morning.

Throughout this work day, the Chinese team continued testing their robots on the field.  They seemed like the most ready team.  The German team however, had lots of work to do as well.  Their flight to London from Germany was delayed and as a result, they missed their flight from London to Vancouver.  They arrived in Vancouver on Saturday night.  They  had even less time than we did to get their robots working.  When each team set up their work space, they each made sure to put up their mascots.  For the Chinese team, they had a panda plush of about 1.5 ft tall and the Germans had a full size German flag.

Game Days

On the game day, I woke at up 5:30 AM and arrived bright and early on campus at 8 AM.  When I arrived, the electrical team was still at it and seemingly not even close to finishing.  This led to a change in the team’s strategy to the competition.  We would try to repair the electrical boards from last year’s robots.  These old boards had a different size than the new ones and had different mounting holes, but luckily, somebody on the team had the great idea of including mounting holes for these old boards for this year’s robots.  Otherwise, we would have had a really hard time hacking that together.  Given only the few hours we had to hack this set up together, the mech team and I worked as fast as we could to finish.  We each probably ran up and down the stairs at the UBC Engineering Design Center about 20 times that day looking for tools and delivering robots.

The first game was supposed to be at 9:30 AM, but my team certainly was not ready.  It seemed like the other teams weren’t completely ready either, so the game was postponed until the afternoon.  The Thunderbots was supposed to play the first game, but due to our lack of readiness, China and Germany played each other instead.  When it became our turn we play, we managed to get three robots out of six on the field.  None of these robots had a working break beam sensor (the sensor on the robot that is designed to detect ball possession).  Without break beams, the robots did not know they could kick the ball, since it would never know if it had ball possession.  The robots did not have a controller that worked well either (the controller determines how much voltage to apply to each of the motors such that the robot can move smoothly from A to B).  A controller that didn’t work well meant the robots drove about on the field seemingly confused.  “Derp” is probably the best word to describe it.  Despite the shortcomings of these three robots, they played their best against ZJUNLIct from China and the Thunderbots were defeated 10-0.

On the following few days, the mech team tried to help the electrical team the best they could with tasks such as building extra connectors.  We also tried to get the old break beam sensors working again.  It was something that had to be on the robot if it were to ever kick the ball properly.  After toiling for a few hours, we managed to get two out of three of them working.  We probably could have gotten more if we knew more about the electrical design.  There was little to go on in terms of the wiring schematic and spare parts.  It was also hard to troubleshoot since ambient lighting largely affected the sensor.  If it worked upstairs in our work space, it wouldn’t work downstairs on the playing field.  It took us a while to figure that out.

In our second game, we played against ER-Force from Deutschland.  For this game, we still only had three robots, but this time they were a little bit better equipped.  Even then, the robots still had trouble kicking because the lights being used on the field emitted too much infrared light, which obstructed the break beam sensors.  It was very frustrating to see the robots not knowing when to kick even though they were handling the ball perfectly. But somehow, we still managed to score a goal.  In the end we lost the game 6 to 1.

In the final game between China’s ZJUNLict and Germany’s ER-Force, the Chinese team was victorious.  Both teams had a full fleet of robots to play six on six.  A modest crowd of spectators also watched the whole game being played and in general people were quite impressed at this engineering feat.

Team Social

To allow the teams to better know one another, there was a social event planned by the organizers of the North American Open.  There, I met a lot of the members of the German and Chinese teams.  It was nice that that I could talk to each team in their native languages.  Although my German wasn’t that good to keep up a conversation for a long time, it was enough to get the Germans wondering how I knew it at all.  The last thing they’d expect is for a Chinese guy to start speaking German to them.  My Mandarin was at a level that I could talk to people in it, but there were still some occasions where I didn’t understand what they said.  It was probably because of me not having a lot of practice with Mandarin (I speak Cantonese normally) and them having an accent from their region that I didn’t recognize.

Press Conference

The organizers made sure to invite as much of the press as they could.  More publicity meant that the team could potentially get more money in sponsorship.  More money means better robots.  The administrative members of the team were in the spotlight and talked to most of the people from the press, while the technical members of the team continued to do their work.  The team leads from mech, software and electrical also had a brief interview with the 24 Hours Vancouver newspaper.  The team was also featured in the Ubbyssey here and on MacLean’s magazine here.

The Chinese team also put on a show for the press by putting all 12 of their robots on the field so they could they play against themselves six on six.  The performance went quite smoothly as there were not random break downs and the press were very impressed.

Engineering Failures

As with these student projects, an accident was bound to happen.  This one was with a battery.  There was have been a defective battery that the Chinese team unknowingly brought and when they charged it, the battery started puffing up – not a good sign for a battery.  One of our team members was quick to notice and instantly dunked it in soap water and disposed of it.

For our team, we had problems where the solenoid kicker would get stuck after being used repetitively.  Heat from the power dissipation in the solenoid windings would heat up the whole assembly and cause the solenoid housing to permanently deform.  The solenoid was produced out of stacked layers of poly-carbonate sheets.  This stacking of layers allowed each layer to deform individually.  To fix this problem, we printed out new housings made of ABS plastic.  By having one solid solenoid housing, it was more difficult for it to deform.

The German team had some problems with the turf getting dug out of the carpet and getting everywhere inside the problem and also with their robot shells not staying on properly.  The turf inside the robot meant that gears could get stuck intermittently and could also get in the way of other mechanical components.  Their solution solution for now was to clean it all out every game.  During games, the shells of the robot would pop out randomly whenever there was an intense impact with a ball or another robot.

Getting Ready for Mexico

On the Friday before all three teams left for Mexico City, everybody had to pack up all of their things.  The German and Chinese teams could pack everything easily since they had packed everything once before when they had to fly to Vancouver.  For us, our tools were scattered all over the place.  It took us about 4 hours to find all tools to pack into the the luggage containers.  The approach to packing was that we would pack any tool that was ours and was already lying out on the table.  This is because if we took it out of the tool closet, it meant that the team used it for something.  Naturally all of the hex keys, screw drivers and the like were packed.  All spare parts were packed.  Every tool that we had sitting around was packed.  Even electrical equipment like a power supply and an oscilloscope was packed.  We had everything we needed for RoboCup 2012 in Mexico City.  Even though not everything was done in time for this competition, everybody was confident that things would be better in the competition in Mexico.

More photos here