IranOpen 2016: The matches have started

6. April 2016 / Henning Pridöhl / Leave a comment

After the Fumanoids had won against the Bold Hearts with 5:0, we were afraid of our first opponent in the tournament. For some inexplicable reasons (something with WiFi?) the Fumanoids’ robots weren’t operational. Most of time in the first half time they didn’t do anything, while our robots felt to ground in entertaining ways, stood up again, walked some steps, felt again just to walk in the different direction afterwards. The last 30 seconds were the most exiting part of the match. A now working robot of the Fumanoids tried to dribble the ball towards our goal, but felt onto the ball just a few centimeters in front of our goal. The game was whistled to a close: 0-0 — draw.

The match against the Bolds Hearts followed shortly. It was again a mostly unspectacular match. In the final phase of the match one of the Bold Heart’s robots started an attack to their own goal. They had luck, the game was closed by the whistle before the attack could be executed successfully.

For the group phase we reached the seconds place in our group. Tomorrow at 11 am (8:30 am in CEST) we will play against the first Iranian opponent in the intermediate round, AEhuman.

The ranking of the other group was determined by penalty shootout, because all teams had the same amount of points: zero.

Ranking group A:
1. Parand
2. MRL
3. AEhuman

Ranking group B:
1. Fumanoids
2. Hamburg Bit-Bots
3. Bold Hearts

More impressions of the tournament in our image gallery:

Symbolic picture for match Hamburg Bit-Bots vs. Bold Hearts ;)

IranOpen 2016 – First impressions

4. April 2016 / Henning Pridöhl / Leave a comment

Since Sunday evening our team is in Teheran. We arrived with a short delay of about two hours at the airport. From there we went to our accommodation to get some sleep. We woke up and it felt like night due to the time shift.

The event site was a positive surprise – the area for the humanoid league was almost completely prepared in the morning of the first setup day.

While our team is preparing for the competition, you can look at some pictures of today morning:

First Morning in Teheran - view to Alborz mountain range

BitBots on their way to the Iran Trade Fair

China – Day 3: Ingenuity and inventiveness

19. July 2015 / Henning Pridöhl / Leave a comment

In China day four slowly got to its end, which means it is time for yesterday’s report.

In the morning we were having our breakfast, still being jet-lagged. Afterwards we went to the competition hall. Since we already knew our hard- and software problems, we could start fixing them right away. Many of us spent their time on the soccer field to be able to test the developments directly. At noon some of us went to a nearby shopping center to have lunch. There were many small food stands with freshly made Chinese food. Many dishes were surprisingly spicy, but altogether very delicious.

When we came back to the hall some of us had organized a large ceramic tile to make smaller tiles out of it, which can be mounted below the feet of Hambot. This should move the center of mass to the bottom to improve Hambot’s stability. But how to cut to equally sized squares out of a ceramic tile without proper tools? The helpful volunteers organized a buzz saw for us, but this one was only suitable for wood. It was not able to cut hard ceramic. So we had no other chance than trying to break it along a sharp edge. It worked amazingly well, but put us into the focus of the people standing nearby.

For the Darwins, the problems at walking could also only be solved by modifying the hardware. Since we already had tried many options for the feet at the German Open, we quickly found a solution. This time we used caps of bottles. We screw them below the feet, with the open side pointing to the floor. This does not affect the extent of the bottom of the feet, but really increases the stability on the artificial turf with its high blades. Now walking works much better.

As you can see, we never feel bored at Bit-Bots.

Off to Iran!

5. April 2015 / Henning Pridöhl / Leave a comment

Once again our robots passed the security checks at the airport. And of course we had a lot of questions from other passengers and airport staff again. Despite that we passed faster than the family in front of us, who had several toy pistols in their hand luggage.

Right now we are using the last moments of Internet in Germany to take a look at our airplane. We assume that it is not only the same, but also the identical airplane (joke got lost during translation).

More updates will follow later, when we spot internet access at our destination.

Hambot

5. April 2015 / Henning Pridöhl / Leave a comment

Those of you who read our articles regularly already know that we are again building a new robot. His name is Hambot and he is the second version of GOAL, our robot we took to the world championships in Brazil last year.

Unfortunately GOAL had some problems to get up, because the relations of motor strength and weight were too bad. But during development last year we learned a lot about CAD and mechanics in robotics. Therefore we wanted to build a new version this season — and we did.

The largest change, which can be seen directly, is that Hambot is produced nearly completely by 3D printing. This has many benefits for us, because we can produce our parts directly in the 3D printing lab next to our room. This “Rapid Prototyping” allows us to create several different versions of a part on one day. For the metal parts we had to wait up to several days or even weeks every time. Additionally plastic weights less than aluminum and is cheaper. But the most important advantage are the richer design possibilities. The metal parts could only be arranged in angles of 90 degrees compared to 3D printing, which has nearly no restrictions. This also allows more human-like structures.

These weren’t the only changes we did. We also improved the interaction with the robot a lot. It now has more and illuminated buttons and a LCD touch display on his back. We also added an RGB-LED Ring on the front and a chip for speech synthesis, so we can understand our robot much better than with the previous software-solution.

A very new field for us was the development of the electronics. More details will follow in a later article.

Luckily we were able to print the last parts and wire the electronics temporarily last week, because this week Hambot has to show his skills at the IranOpen. We wait eagerly!

Besides our new robot we had another reason to celebrate: Last week we handed in our first paper for the RoboCup symposium. Again more details will follow later.

Conclusively we had an eventful start in the new season. You will find more information about it in the Substanz magazine (a German popular-science magazine), which visited us last week to capture the atmosphere in the lab shortly before a competition.

Both, electronics and models for 3D printing can be found on our Github page, where we will release all our soft- and hardware as open source in future.

https://github.com/bit-bots

New homepage design

4. April 2015 / Henning Pridöhl / Leave a comment

As you surely have noticed, things look different here since some days.

Our site really got long in the tooth. Since we have nobody working full time on it, we always have difficulties keeping the site in an adequate state. Of course we put most of our time in the development of the robots — but we kept you in mind. Before we don’t have any time because of the running season, we now want to use the time to make some improvements.

The most important improvement is probably our “responsive” design. It means that the content of our page it automatically adjusted to your screen size. Smartphone users can now read our page without having their fingers hurt because of excessive scrolling.

The menu now follows your scrolling, so you have access to it at any time, no matter where you are reading on our page. Our website’s calendar is now automatically synced with SOGo, which is a groupware solution we have used internally for a while now.

Photos are a considerable problem for us. We would like to present you as many of them as possible, but it costs a lot of time to sort them, prepare them for the web and publish them in a good way. Therefore you will miss photos at many places. We even have more than thousands photos (yes, really!) of the last championships, which we want to release. In future people are asked to keep the camera only on a few interesting motives, but you may know how difficult it is to restrict yourself =)

From a technical point of view we already did a larger change some time ago: We replaced the free (as in beer), but restricted and increasingly less well maintained version of NextGen by the public domain plugin WPPA+, because we were increasingly dissatisfied with NextGen. (Those of you who visit us more regularly might have noticed that our gallery didn’t always work). WPPA+ is quite new and the functionality is already really great (means: we want to make some more changes). It was a lot of work to migrate the 1264 photos into the new system, unfortunately all titles and comments were lost during the procedure. It wasn’t worth for us to write a software which rescues this data. Also the order of the pictures isn’t optimal, as automatic ordering fails because of missing meta data — and we didn’t have time to order them manually.In the near feature we would like to add more photos successively and edit the existing ones. Just visit us from time to time!

tl;dr?

On the new website everything got better now, but nothing is perfect!

If you notices things which may not work as expected after the conversion, feel free to write us an email or a comment. We will prioritize by the amount of complains — and of course we take praises too 😉