Sometimes something unexpected happens and suddenly one finds himself on the other side of the world. Something like that just happened to four brave Bit-Bots: Last Week Jasper and Sebastian (human), as well as Rory and Jack (humanoid) were informed that they were supposed to fly to Beijing a few days later to give a presentation at the first Running Robot Competition…

This message left us with a lot of excitement, but also a lot of stress: There was so much to do in such little time; and so all gears were set in motion to ensure that we got our visa by wednesday evening, so we could board our flight on thursday morning. The flight went pretty uneventful, and just 19 hours later we found ourselves at the convention centre, ready to set up. Our presentation was supposed to be on Saturday, so there was more than enough time to prepare everything and everything should be smooth sailing, right? Wrong! Turns out, packing in a hurry leads to chaos and so we stood in Beijing with two charged and two empty batteries and without a charging cable, and with a very short LAN cable. But we arranged and everyone seemed to have liked our presentation. In fact, it went so well, that chinese television decided to have an interview with us (link).

But we hadn’t just taken this journey to give a short talk. We also wanted to see the other presentations and, of course, the competition. While, sadly, most of the other demonstrations turned out to be dancing robots that play keyframe animations, which is not really interesting for our research, we still met many new, and surprisingly a few known faces. The competition consisted of several parcour elements the robot had to cross. They had eight minutes to solve eight different tasks. Most of these tasks could be solved rather easily with a decent colour recognition, but for a first year it still was a challenge and we hope the difficulty will improve in the next years and drive the competition towards new smart solutions. Maybe reducing the colours of the parcour elements would be a good start to force the participants to use artificial intelligence.

Lastly we also found some time to look around in Beijing. Thanks to our amazing guides we got to see the Forbidden City, the Olympic Park and Tian’anmen Square. We also went to visit the campus of the Tsinghua University and get to see our guides’ lab.

And suddenly, just three days after our arrival it was already time to leave. It were stressful, yet very interesting days. And maybe we will come back one day.

After our arrival, the setup days were very busy while we prepared our hard- and software, which is why we didn’t have the time to publish another article yet. Today we put our hard work of the last days to the test in the first games of this years world championship.

During the preparation days we spontaneously decided to switch out parts of our modular vision pipeline with a neural network based on the YOLO architecture – with surprising results: We were able to detect balls across the whole field. The goalpost detection was also greatly improved by these changes. We were expecting some improvements by exchanging the module, but still everyone was very surprised by just how good it actually worked.

Another thing we changed: We’re dynamic. We introduced DynUp™ and a reworked version of the dynamic kick that was initially developed by a group of students in one of our bachelor courses. These modules allow our robots to stand up even faster while being more stable and to kick the ball in different directions without falling over.

Finally, we also made some changes to our tactics, and improved some visualization tools to help us keep an overview of what the robot is doing during the games.

Today, we had a lot of chances to test out, whether our changes actually work out: With 6 Drop-in, and 4 regular games we were busy all day. Luckily, thanks to our cooperation with the WF Wolves, together we were able to have our robots play in all games, while also covering several referee duties.

However, not everything went perfect today and at one point it looked really dark for us: When we replaced our cameras earlier this year, we did not keep in mind the additional weight. While our modified head stayed intact, the part connecting the head to the body wasn’t made for the additional forces and broke. After our game against ZJLabers, the heads of three of our four robots were detatched from their bodies. Things looked dire, until a smart idea saved the day. We repurposed one of our metal parts, which were less likely to break, and attached the head to it. This way we were able to keep on playing with the new camera and perform many great moves in the remaining games. Unfortunately we haven’t been rewarded with any wins yet, but we keep on trying our best and are excited for the coming days.