It Ends...
This is a big day. Today we will show off our open challenge. Everything was perfect... Our code just works, the last bugs had been squashed, and we added some nice metis branding.
There was nothing that could go wrong… right? It was 14:00, our demo was at 14:20. We went with our pepper downstairs and backstage. We had 20 minutes to prepare our open challenge. Everything when perfect, we only had a small issue getting the robot to wake up properly, but we quickly resolved it. We tested it out, tried all the commands, and it all went flawlessly. 10 minutes left. We memorized our text, and had a quick look at how it went for the Australians, it seemed to go well. Our time had come. The Australians left the stage, and we entered.
We started the program and explained it to the public. While we were talking, the robot recognized a command… No big deal, we just restarted it and the public didn’t really notice. We gave our first example. I walked up to the pepper and said: “pepper, remind me of something”. Nothing. I said it again. Nothing. We restarted the program. Nothing. I said it again and it finally understood me. I asked it to remind me of it in 5 seconds. 10 seconds later, it played it back to me. No big deal, the public probably didn’t notice the time difference.
The next demo came, we said: “pepper, play a video”. It didn’t understand us. We tried it a few times and were about to give up and try the next command. As soon as we gave up, it recognized the command and played the YouTube video.
The final and 3rd demo. We asked the pepper “look up a definition”. No response. It took us a couple of tried, and when we finally got it to work, I said “Netherlands”. It kind of worked, but it answered about “Raccoon”. I tried it again, this time it was another word that wasn’t Netherlands. I tried Linux, again, it recognized another word.
This demo wasn’t a big success, but we still had hope, because we did show off all of the features, the features that were quite impressive all on their own. Afterwards, we concluded that we were talking too fast out of stress.
It was 16:15. The time of the award ceremony had come. At first, they called all of the teams one by one. We got a really nice Certificate of Participation that is definitely going to hang on my wall. At first, they gave the prices for the skill challenges. We didn’t expect anything because our submissions weren’t very impressive, the Austrailian team won the skill challenges, something that was no surprise at all for us and we all congratulated them heavily. Now came the open challenge prices. Third place, a Japanese team. Second place, the USA team.
First place…
The Austrailian team.
We were both sad and happy at the same time. We were sad for us and happy for our good friends the Austrailian team. We heavily congratulated them for getting 1st for both categories.
We had some really nice chats with the other teams, thanked each other for the amazing times, made a lot of pictures and went back to our staying place. We were on the station waiting for our train. Our favorite teams, the Austrailian and Thailand teams were both on the other side of the rails. We took pictures of each other and said goodbye.
~ Noah