Time really flies during competitions. Here is just a short recap of what we all did yesterday.

Since the vision of our robots was rather slow (it worked, but it was too slow to be useful in a game), we used the vision of the WF Wolves, and adapted it to our robots and our needs (for example they also factor in how the head of the robot is inclined; we don’t have this data). In general we threw out a few features to make the vision faster.

The colour config got adapted to this surrounding and artificial turf. We are still working on computing the horizon, currently it starts from below which results in a wrong horizon so that balls get left out. We will try to compute it from above.

Furthermore we are working on a ‘top-down’ object detection, this means we know what we are looking for in a picture (the ball). This method is based on human perception.

 

For some time we have been using ROS, Robot Operating System, which provides a consistent standard (and made it possible to just use the vision of the WF Wolves). ROS has many advantages, but our RecordUI, with which we recorded movement sequences, does not work anymore. That’s why a few people sat together and wrote a plugin for ROS so that we can record sequences again.

 

Also we wrote a boot-script, so that software that is already on the robot will be executed when started, even without connection to a computer. The walking-configuration was adjusted to the really short artificial turf here. Motors in Minibot which were older and used were changed. Several things, especially the flight to Nagoya, were organised for the World Championship. Older and out-of-date Plugins for this website were updated or changed so that this article hopefully will be linked on Facebook and Twitter again.

Two team members were occupied with organisational stuff like game plans for the German Open; for example we will have several Drop-In Games next to the normal games. Here this will mean that two teams play together, and each has to provide two robots and play against the other two teams with two robots each. The GameController got fixed and the teams were inscribed.

After this exhausting but productive day we had roasted potatoes with red cabbage, as well as spaghetti with tomato sauce for dinner, so that hopefully we could continue to concentrate on working today.