Since the beginning of 2017 we are heavily working on our new software architecture. We decided to move away from our old self-written system. Starting with the competitions this year, the RoboCup GermanOpen and IranOpen, our robots are using ROS (see ros.org). This gives us lots of benefits but also there is still a lot of work to do.

Most of our code is rewritten or integrated into ROS by now. Since we can use the same programming languages as before (Python and C++), we were able to keep parts of our old codebase. We are going this step together with other teams from the humanoid kid-size league who also are using ROS and the proposed architecture. This enables exchangeability of the ROS nodes. On this way, we were already capable of testing the other team’s vision code with minimal effort on our system.

Other benefits are the debugging tools and other libraries provided by ROS.

Our software is open source, you can find it on https://github.com/bit-bots/.

We are heavily encouraging other teams also to use our proposed architecture or getting in touch with us to discuss further improvements.

The new architecture was developed as a master’s thesis (see Publications) and will be presented at the RoboCup Symposium 2017 in Nagoya, Japan. We hope that an open architecture can help other teams to focus on improving their codebase and ease the access to the league for new teams.