Post #24 of "Today In The AA" series. (~8 minute read) Click to go to Part 2 of this post!
Arrival In Korea
I arrived in Seoul on Saturday evening and took a 3 hour bus to Daejeon from the Incheon International Airport.A bed of Skyscapers tile the neo-Korean city landscape, giving a futuristic sci-fi ambience as we approach from the perimeter. Upon arrival I was greeted by many rounded symbols, none of which were English. Along with these symbols I was greeted by a friendly taximan who gestured me to board. I was indirectly given a tour of Daejeon as we navigated the various interlinked streets searching for my hotel. Roughly 20 minutes later after stopping at Toyoko Inn, one of the welcome receptionists called the hotel I'm actually supposed to be at and gave the taxi man directions. Yeah, you're reading this right. I'm standing in a Japanese hotel lobby with my cab driver and a panel of Korean receptionists, waving my hands around with an airport sleep pillow wrapped around my neck. Thankfully exhaustion is a universal language, and they figured I wasn't about to go hiking up a mountain (you'd be surprised...).
I got back to the taxi and navigated to the hotel. Out of all this assistance and time driving, he charged me 7500 Won, which is roughly $8.74 Canadian. I was expecting a couple more zeros in that number, but instead I was assisted out of the cab with nothing but a friendly smile from the driver and my phone I almost forgot in the cab.
I ensured didn't drop any of my belongings on the dim lit road of dunsan-ro. I entered my room, plucked in the key card I was given, and the room came to life.
Goodstay Samjoha Motel suite |
I capitalized on sleep the next day and caught up on studies (since I was just coming from another conference). Let's fast forward to Monday, where the magic begins.
IROS Day 1 (Preparation)
![]() |
Streets of Daejeon just outside of hotel. |
|
|
|
![]() |
Magic show setup |
The other teams starting streaming in, first the Taipei Snipers and then Qiron Robotics.
![]() |
Food! |
Most of my day was spent focusing on playing card recognition for my trick. I needed the Darwin OP2 I was using to correctly classify cards from a standard deck. I worked several hours of the day adding new configuration settings for dilation, contouring, and other ways to handle the changing brightness in the room.
Practising at home was simple enough; but on competition day out here I'll be required to bring the robot to the front of the audience, and have it correctly classify cards while there is a glaring light from the projector light on it, and the sun being all bright and sunshiny.
Alongside the lighting issue, there was practice for a drone manoeuvring competition going on in the area immediately next to us.
These things are loud as you can probably imagine. Much like loons with air-horns for beaks, they make a loud droning sound as they hover through obstacles before hitting an object and screeching towards the ground to explode into several pieces. I don't think that part is intentional; but it's so amusing to watch. This does pose as a difficult speech recognition challenge though... My robot is required to hear me talk to it, and even with a good quality microphone there is severe obstruction with the drones flying about. This added challenge makes the whole competition more interesting in my point of view. By now you can also deduce which teams are using vision and speech... we're all lining the drone competition stadium... watching -- straight faced -- impressed, yet desperately wanting to give their team leader an uppercut.
Come evening, there was a snazzy conference dinner just outside of the convention centre.
![]() |
Water show! Or perhaps another drone crashed into the pond? |
We took a nice walk back to the hotels together and I worked on vision throughout the night, tuning the robot with 1 day left to practice...
IROS Day 2: Last day for preparation
I went for a nice walk to the convention centre enjoying more of the scenery now that I actually know where I'm going. Upon arrival by around 9am I resumed vision and speech tuning.![]() |
Beautiful scenery walking to convention center. |
Team HURO Arrives later in the morning and began setting up what looks to be quite an elaborate trick. They refrained from performing live in front of us. I figure they either have a really rock solid presentation ready, or have nothing ready.
Later in the evening the finalist competition times were posted:
Qiron Robotics: 8:30am
Seed Robotics: 9am
Snobots: 9:30am
Taipei Snipers: 10am
HURO: 10:30am
I tried to head back earlier to catch up on some rest, but was mainly focused on vision tuning yet again, trying to decide on the best approach to ensure classification worked.... No matter what... on live competition day, the 3 cards need to be classified correctly, or else it would fail in front of the whole audience, and butcher my chances of placing well. Let's see how things turn out...
Part 2 >>
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please feel free to give feedback/criticism, or other suggestions! (be gentle)