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 😉

It starts again! After many months of preparation, we will start up the new season by attending the Iran Open (06. – 10.) in Teheran. There we are going to make up for the early elimination of the preseason. After a 10-day break, we will aim at winning the German Open in Magdeburg. Afterwards, we will prepare for the world championship in China where we will compete by the middle of July.

There are not only tournaments, but of course lectures will take place, too. And, by the end of the year, we are going to organise the 2nd RoHOW together with the HULKs again.

Additionally, we will release Hambot soon. Hambot is our self-constructed robot and the successor of GOAL. Over the last months, we went to great effort to put the final touches on it.

You see, this season promises to be intensive and interesting!

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.

On sunday, the RowHOW was open to the general public. During the day, we had several hundred visitors who watched not only the friendly matches but also several popular science talks. All in all, the day was a huge success.

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.