Published April 25, 2016 by Tom Porter

Bowdoin's "Northern Bites" Place Second in RoboCup 2016 US Open FInal

Bowdoin’s “Northern Bites” prepare to take the field against the University of Miami’s “RoboCanes”
Bowdoin’s “Northern Bites” prepare to take the field against the University of Miami’s “RoboCanes”

Bowdoin’s team of autonomous, robotic soccer players—the “Northern Bites”—took second place in the RoboCup 2016 US Open, held at Watson Arena over the weekend. For the second year running the Northern Bites lost in the final, this time going down, 5-0, to The University of Texas’s “Austin Villa.”

Professor of Computer Science and team advisor Eric Chown said he was “super happy” with second place. “Although we lost 5-0, it was only 1-0 at half-time and a pretty great game in which our goalie was once again spectacular, but our robots started, literally, falling apart in the second half,” which he said meant Bowdoin ended up only being able to field three “players,” out of a possible maximum of five. Five universities and colleges from the across the nation came to Brunswick Friday for the two-day tournament.

The next challenge for the Northern Bites is the RoboCup world championships in Leipzig, Germany, at the end of June. Read more about Bowdoin’s Northern Bites RoboCup team