News in english
On Wednesday, February, 25th, 2015 you will find us again at the Hamburg University day. Prospective students and interested people can visit us and our robots from 9 am to 4 pm at the entrance hall of the chemistry department (Martin-Luther-King-Platz 6).
By now there are also some videos and articles about us in the media landscape. A cool short video about us was made by our “Fanzine” Substanz.
Link to the corresponding site at Substanz. (Unfortunately both, video and article, are only available in German)
Substanz also made a report about the final game of the two RoHOW organizators — Hamburg Bit-Bots vs. Hulks. Link to the article. (again only in German, sorry!)
Additionally Spiegel TV Wissen covered the German Open in a report of which we are part of. It contains a few small mistakes, e.g. incorrectly assigned names and mixed up prices for robots, but in spite of everything the report is still a good one.
(Unfortunately in German again)
The teams which qualified for the World Championships 2015 in China were just announced. We belong to these and will of course take part!
You can find a great overview of the participating teams on the official website. It includes the well worth seeing application videos, the TDPs (Team Description Paper) and technical information about the robots used. Everyone interested in the contest can get a good picture about the participating teams. If you plan to found your own team, especially take a look at the TDPs! (Since some time we are pleased to get requests from people all over the world who want to get into robotics and specifically into Robocup.)
You will find our own application video for season 2015 at the bottom of this article. Besides the part showing compulsory skills, which is required for qualification, our video additionally contains scenes showing the state of our current research.
The application video was used for the application to the Iranian championships 2015 too, for which we are qualified (but still waiting for the acceptance of our traveling costs by the Iran). For the German championships no video showing our robots’ skills was required, but a TDP.
Enjoy watching!
Now that we have recovered from organizing the RoHOW, it is time to look back and review the workshop.
The schedule alternated between talks and matches, which was very well received by the visitors. By playing halves of the SPL (Standard Platform League) matches during the half-time break of the Humanoid Kid-Sized League matches and vice versa, we were able to continously show gameplay and illustrate the differences between those leagues. At the end of the day we even had a special match between the SPL HULKs and our Humanoid Kid-Sized robots.
Among the visitors were many small children. While we could not really satisfy the young children with the scientific talks, they instead had the opportunity to steer a robot with an Xbox controller. A feat some 4-year-olds managed to do much better than their parents.
Beside the inspiring discussions with our guest teams, we were especially excited about the cooperation with the HULKs of the Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH), a team that, like ours, is completely organized by students. They hosted the RoHOW together with us and provided much of the organisation to get the location at the TUHH. We wish to thank the HULKs for joining us in making the RoHOW possible. At this scale, we wouldn’t have been able to accomplish it alone. We look forward to the opportunity of future collaboration on other projects.
At the beginning of 2015 we will probably play on artificial turf, that is the reason we decided to train our Robots ahead of time. There is a significant difference of the level of difficulty between the carpet we are playing on now and the artificial turf.
After plenty of time of consideration, we decided on an artificial turf with a height of 40mm and an appearance of natural grass. Due to a special composition of fiber at the bottom it makes the ‘blades of grass’ able to stand upright and filling sand becomes unnecessary. The reason we choose artificial turf with a level of difficulty so high is to be able to play on all sorts of artificial turf.
We will be launching the training on the new underground as soon as possible.
Our department has a big annual exhibition of student projects and theses. This year our team took part with “GOAL – a humanoid robot with more degrees of freedom” and won the third place! We are very happy about this result and will continue our work even more enthusiastic.
Now it is set: We were kicked out by the runner-ups of this world championships! The Bold Hearts lost their final match with 2:3 agains CIT Brains. Congratualations again to the Bold Hearts, we cheered for them during all matches after the intermediate round. The other game that we lost during this competition was against team Eros which made it to the fourth place today. So we had really bad luck in the drawing this time and leaving the tournament that early is not at all a shame.
We spend the last regular competition day with watching the final games, recording some test pictures on the field and tidying up our table. In the evening we first went to the award ceremony and then to the banquet. The latter was a bit chaotic and not even the salad appeared to be vegetarian, but we had great fun and used the time talking to other teams. Tomorrow the symposium will take place and it is the first time we will participate. We are really looking forward to a last day of serious RoboCup discussions.
Another thing that was confirmed today and that we do not want to hold back is the venue for next year: RoboCup 2015 will take place in Hefei, China! And in 2016 the RoboCup will come to Germany again as the Trustees accepted the application of Leipzig. We are pleased about both decisions 🙂
As each year, the traditional league picture has been taken.
First the picture of all the robots:
At the World Cup, there are often demo matches with mixed teams arranged. We united with the Bold Hearts to play against the team Rhoban Football Club from France. We set a goalkeeper, a defender and a fielder, the Bold Hearts set two additional fielders. The french team placed only three robots. The match startet with an excellent kick-off
by Tamara from our team, which rolled in front of the opposite goal. In the following it appeared that the communication between robots from different teams isn’t perfect by now. There were not only arrangement problems between the three fielders but also with the goalkeeper. The former made all three field players fight for the ball against each other, the second made our robots play on their own goal. In the end Rhoban Football Club won with 2:3 with two out of three goals against us were shot by our own robots, the third one was prepared by them. To execute our goalkeeper we have to say that one goal was shot behind his back so he had no chance to defend it.
The match was not only a great fun for the teams but also for the audience. It appeared that a lot work is still necessary in the field of common team communication to play in serious mixed teams. We will use the reamining time here in Brazil to continue developing an architecture for that together with other teams.
Next our Technical Challenge will take place. We will participate in the synthetic turf challenge (which was suggested by our team last year). In this challenge our robot needs to cross a synthetic turf as quickly as possible. In addition we will try the throw-in challenge. The new hands which were originally developed for the new GOAL robot, proved to be not optimal for the small Darwins, but we tried our best to teach Wheatly throwing. Now he just needs to give proof of that during the technical challenge!
After we lost our game in the intermediate round against the Bold Hearts, we started to prepare for the technical challenges. Additionally we had time to look around in the hall. The Major and the Junior leagues are in separated halls. The hall for the junior competitions is a closed building and cooled down a bit too much. The hall for the major competitions is not that closed. Due to much air exchange, it’s nearly as warm as
outside. And this is pretty hot and wet here in Brazil. Therefore, all of the teams have free access to drinking water. Furthermore there are cooled meeting rooms in the team area. Mostly they are used for the official meetings, but the teams can also block them for their meetings. But the best arrangement on this Word Championship are the hammocks to relax in. It’s much more comfortable to sleep in there than laying down in a hidden corner of the hall.
As it always happens on major competitions, there are some things not working properly. Quiet often we have
trouble with the internet connection. Yesterday was the first day we were able to use the official wired connection. The days before we plugged a very long cable through the hall. Finally we used the uplink of the Hulks. The Hulks are the standard platform league team using NAO robots, from the TU Hamburg Harburg. Meanwhile, there are still problems with the internet connection, but the wireless on the fields is astonishingly reliable (at least for us) thanks to the members of the technical committee collecting the team WLAN routers, which are used illegally. In the competition area, there are so many official wireless connections, so it’s strictly forbidden, to set up an own wireless. Unfortunately we don’t have a storage rack for our hardware stuff as it was promised in Eindhoven last year. Due to that, there is always very much stuff on our small team table. Luckily our table is placed directly at on of the four fields and close to the visitors area. So, we have many opportunities to talk to visitors. Additionally our robots are a very famous photo motive!
We needs first getting used to having a high presence of policeman additionally to many very helpful volunteers in the competition hall. A lot heavily armed policeman are patrolling especially in the evening after the audience left the venue. There are even more outside at the parking area and at the entrances. However, this seems to be common, because on our way back to the hotel we used to see police at the beach or sidewalk.
We allowed our robots to relax from the stresses and strains of the last days. They took some pictures of themselves about what they experienced in the hall and we will hand them in during the next days. Most of the time they were diligent as always watching other robots playing to learn from their tactics.
