Event after Mexico our robots have to stay fit, that is why Atlas is training hard again. Especially as he is going to fight for his honour in a competition against one of his programmers during the Informatics Summer Festival.
The Bit-Bots landed more or less safely at the Hamburg Airport yesterday evening. The Team looks back at a successful world cup, with a lot of knowledge sharing with other teams and some smaller, hard earned, successes (our robot actually threw the ball!).
An official ranking which takes into account the technical challenges unfortunately has not been published yet. Because we made 8 Points there, and only six teams dared to approach the challenges, we hope for a place in the top-ten despite our defeats. Currently only the results of the individual games can be viewed online.
While the team members that attended the world cup still recuperate from their jet-lag we have prepared some visualisation of the work on our software within the last weeks.
The nodes of this tree-structure represent files and folders in the main development branch of our version control system.
One day reflects to roughly 10 seconds of the visualisation and you can see how developers modify the project with each commit (green = add, orange = modify, red = delete). At June the 15. was the take-of for the team. You can clearly see how the competition had impact on our activity. (The Time reflects to CEST, the local Mexican time is -7 hours)
For the technical interested: We use gource as a visualisation tool for git. Linux-Users can install it directly via their software-center.
If you change to a directory containing a git-repository and execute “gource”, it will render a nice visualisation of your own project.
Pretty much of a show for just 10 seconds of work!
Finally, we got around to cut a video of the throw-in, which was done successfully by Wheatley at the technical challenge.
We have good and bad news.
We lost the last match against the world-cup holders team DARwin from the USA with a final score of 0:10, despite Wilma, Tamara and GLaDOS almost hang on through the end. Our goalie faced some problems in the beginning, doing not much in favor of the game, and doing even less in the following.
However, Wilma and Tamara did a good job and made some brilliant kick-offs, confusing the opponent-team.
The Throw-In-Challenge was fabulous, (Money quote Maike: Wir sind Helden! [we are heroes!]). Wheatly recognized the game-ball skillfully at the sidelines, placed it before himself, grabbed it and threw it powerful (in the wrong direction) away.
That got us eight points! (out of ten).
Now we’re preparing our robot-team for the ‘demonstration-games’ at 4pm (23h in Hamburg-time). There we compete with five of our robots against other teams. Cross your fingers – and if you could break away from the tv soon enough (Germany is playing soccer today at the european championships), we would maybe provide you a live-stream to the demonstration-games!
We had our first match against the NUBots from Australia this morning. We were evenly matched, but on field our robots had some troubles, like game-ball recognition, since the game field was very dark and the general lighting conditions weren’t that good either. Furthermore we had to struggle with an unstable WLAN connection with the gamecontroller. Nevertheless we managed to maintain a score of 0:0.
The second match was only an hour later and Maike was chosen for the referee of another game also. This was unfortunate, since we couldn’t improve much meanwhile. At the beginning of the match against Team RoBIU from Israel, Maike wasn’t finished with her job. Furthermore our game was at another game-field again. This resulted in another problem: we had to correct the game-ball recognition again. With the help of a timeout and the half-time break we managed to fix it, so that we were able to play correctly in the second half. This is visualized in the score: In our first half our opponents scored 4 goals, but in the second half only one. So the game end with a score of 0:5.
After that we focused on the upcoming last match against the world cup holders DARwin and the throw-in-challenge, coming up tomorrow noon.
And so a stressful day is drawing to an end.
Here are some pictures for you:
Now the promised scores of all games of the first stage of RoboCup2012. And here is the schedule of the upcoming second stage (round robin).
As mentioned before, we had our first match against the Berlin United – FUmanoids ending with a score of 0:0 this at noon. Since there was no winning-team, we had a penalty shootout in the evening to decide this match. So we had all the afternoon to improve the behaviour of our goal scorer and fix some bugs, that occured during the game.
The penalty shootout was very nerve-wracking for both teams and the spectators from the other teams. The first 5 attempts to score a goal weren’t successfully for any team, so the rules dictate that the following attempts were made without a goalkeeper. After 11 additionals attempts and half an hour later, the Berlin-team was lucky and scored a goal. In our team nearly everything failed and we lost with a score of 0:1.
At the end of the day, we celebrated Maikes birthday (in accordance to the German time) with a nice ‘Happy Birthday’ and a cake.
Tomorrow at 14:30, we will continue with a match against the NUBots. Next up: the detailed schedule.
The first game has preliminary ended, the score so far is 0:0 and the match will be decided through a penalty shoot-out this evening (Mexican local time). We are very happy about this temporary result against a very strong opponent, the FUmanoids from Berlin (http://www.fumanoids.de).
The RoboCup2012 released its first video. At 0:57 you can see two members of our team 🙂
It’s Day 4 now at home in Hamburg too. The 7 hour time offset makes it possible for the on-site team to commit the current code with tasks in the evening and let it be worked on overnight from the rest of the team in Hamburg.
Today finally is our first match at 12 o’clock pm (Mexico) and accordingly 7 o’clock pm (Hamburg). The team has made contact a short while ago and is now working parallel on the hoped-for success!
Cross your fingers!!! Our first opponent is a friendly and very successful team from Berlin.
A nice time for us all!!!! 
