RoboCup Canada, Day 8: Hip Hip Hooray!

The competition was over.

Well, truthfully, we were a bit bummed out about it. We knew we had a good robot and if it had worked properly, we think would have done really well. We had not made the finals, and the disappointment was evident in the team.

We had a well deserved late morning, sleeping in and getting up just in time to get breakfast before it closed.

We didn’t really have any plans for today. We thought we wander around the city for a bit, explore some of the many things that we hadn’t had a chance to see yet. The soccer team were still going strong, so we considered heading to the venue to check them out and also while we were at it, watch some of the finals from our league.

We arrived and watched the soccer team for a bit. It was nice to be at the competition and not be stressed about competing, we actually had a good chance to look around and appreciated some of the other awesome events going on.

One of the major soccer leagues
The venue! Featuring Graham’s snazzy sunnys.

At one point, the mentor for the other Australian team pulled Graham aside and told him something secretly. I thought it was a bit odd, but promptly forget about it.

We ended up over at our competition and watched the finals. I got some footage of the Japanese team and the American team completing the final course. The Japanese team were very efficient in the course, choosing what worked well for their robot. The American team attempted to do the drop test first, which may have caused connectivity issues in their robot, as they had issues during the rest of their run.

The final course

Unfortunately, it seemed our dreadful curse had been passed on to the other Australian team. They were having issue after issue, just like we were having. They unfortunately didn’t do very well in the finals.

We watched the end of the finals and witnessed TUPAC, the Japanese team win the competition. They definitely deserved it, their robot was an excellent robot and they were a great team. The announced that they would also be awarding the Open Source and Innovation Award. My heart started racing, it had been in the back of my mind for the last few days, but I’d almost forgotten amidst the hectic issues we’d had.

Raymond announced it was a close competition between TUPAC, who had detailed and informative information about the workings of their robot and S.A.R.T. whose information was far more accessible, albeit not as in depth. Raymond decided that the award should go to us because if Raymond had to guide someone on how to begin building a robot to enter the comp, he would direct them to our website.

We were overjoyed! We had won something! It felt much better knowing we weren’t going home empty handed. Also we knew that if we didn’t win, the last S.A.R.T. would mock us endlessly, so this gave us a free pass to avoid most of the banter.

I think it goes without saying, we were feeling much better.

The team!

 It was also the day of the awards ceremony. We didn’t know if we were going to get an award on stage. We watched TUPAC recieve a trophy on stage, and… nope. Oh well. We watched the presentation of many many awards across all the different leagues, it was quite a big competition.

Our dear Gerry was the presenter of the award

At the end, we recieved our certificate for Open Source & Innovation and posed for a photo!

Open Source & Innovation! (Ben not to scale)

We went out to a nice Italian resturant for dinner. The comp was finally over and so, now it was time to explore the city!

On a side note, the soccer team discovered that you could take the skin off the bears that we’d been handing out. Chaos ensued.

God, what have we done? Have you forsaken us?

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