In the first week of May we once again went to the German Open, the german championship of RoboCup. After giving our laboratory a good cleaning on Monday we made sure not to forget anything. Then on Tuesday it was time to journey towards Magdeburg where we bought some important groceries for the next few days. Afterwards we spent the rest of the day (and night) preparing for the competition by programming…

On Wednesday after a good breakfast together we were finally allowed to enter the exhibition halls. Fortunately everything was ready for us to directly start capturing data from the court with the help of our vision robot Davros.

The captured footage will soon be used to evaluate different approaches of implementing a visual compass. A visual compass is supposed to recognize prominent background landmarks and then determining its own orientation. This is quite important to, for example, classify which goal is ours or the other teams.

Afterwards it was time to teach our humanoid robots how to stand up on the new surface.

At the same time our software development team was busy as well. The robots tactics weren’t nearly tested well enough to work reliably and there were also communication problems between different parts of our software. Unfortunately we weren’t able to completely eliminate all problems before our first game against WF Wolves. But because they were in a similar position we were able to end this game with a score of 0:0. Although we constantly improved most other teams with more stable code were able to beat us in the next few games.

In the last game of the group stage it was a close call. WF Wolves just lost their last game and we were up against Rhoban FC, the current world champion from France. Our hopes were low (rightly so) and the only possibility for us to progress into the semi-final was to achieve a lower goal difference than WF Wolves had. Only because Rhoban FC had networking problems in the second halftime we were able to achieve exactly that. They didn’t score enough goals and therefore enabled us to ‘beat’ WF Wolves.

The semi-final was against the Chinese Team ZJUDancer and their robots nimbly played around our larger ones. They scored multiple goals and we lost that round.

The last game for third place was against Starkit, a Russian team. Since their software and robots was largely bought from Rhoban FC we lost this game as well
But during this game we had the opportunity to reflect how far we have come. From the first game where our robots were barely able to stand to a closely integrated software and hardware system that was able to defend its own goal from an incoming attack and also chose to dribble towards the enemies goal. Although all this is not fully stable and reliable, that’s exactly what we’re working on right now in preparation of Australia’s RoboCup world championship this summer.

We prepared a small summary on Youtube as well.

an article by Sebastian Stelter and Jonas Hagge
After an exciting group phase we got a place in the semi final!
We have used the days before the group phase sucessfully to prepare our robots for the competition. In the group phase we were able to in detail test our soft- and hardware changes, which we have made in this season. We have discovered a few problems in the communication between the software modules, but in the end our components communicated successfully with each other. We were really happy about our hardware. After our work on our cable management, we only had one broken cable and only had to invest very little time in hardware problems.
To be honest we only qualified for the semi final by a small margin. In the end we had a very exciting game against the world champion and managed to qualify successfully.
We are not finished yet though. The semi final is coming up in a few minutes and we are preparing as much as we can to raise our chances to qualify for the final.

On Tuesday it will start for us. We will be going to the German Open 2019!

The German Open is the German championship in the RoboCup. There are competitions in the 6 Major Leagues, so all kinds of robots, from helping in crisis situations to save lives to our soccer playing robots. 40 teams from 16 countries will be there to fight to win the German Open competitons.

We will get the opportunity to try out and present the changes to our Software and Hardware which we have made since the last world cup in official games. With the new insight we can give the finishing touches to our robots before we fly to the next world cup.

The other teams in our league, which we will play against, are:
WF Wolves (Ostfalia Hochschule für angewandte Wissenschaften, Germany)
Rhoban FC (Université de Bordeaux, France)
Starkit (Moscow institute of physics and technology, Russia)
ZJUDancer (Zhejiang University, China)

Visitors are invited to the German Open from Friday (3.5) to Sunday (5.5.). There is no entrance fee for our fans (or other visitors).
More Information is available here: https://robocupgermanopen.de/en/visitors
We will continue to report from the German Open on this blog and our social media channels.

Last Thursday, on March 28, the Girls Day took place at the department of computer science at Universität Hamburg. The Girls Day is an event for girls attending grade five to ten, where they have the chance to get to know technical institutions or companies. We offered a project to provide an inside on robotics.

As last year the students used a cozmo, a small robot from anki, to accomplish a task. First they got to know the robot. Then they developed a computer program to lead the robot through a labyrinth. This was realized with lots of enthusiasm by the girls.

At the end of the day a small contest was hold to find out whose robot was the fastest on the way through the labyrinth. Everybody was proud to reach the goal. The fastest group accomplished the task in 40 seconds. All in all it was a funny and successful day.

The qualified teams for the championship in RoboCup for 2019 have been published. We are happy to be one of the 20 teams which is allowed to participate in the Humanoid Kid Size League.

We are one of the 19 Teams, which is fully qualified. This means we are allowed to play in the regular games as well as in the Drop-in games. One team is only qualified to play the Drop-in games.
Drop-in games are a special game mode. In this game mode multiple teams provide one robot each to form a temporary joint team. These teams are randomly chosen. While cooperation between teams is the main focus of this form of competition, each robot is scored individually based on their performance.

The Drop-in games might be especially relevant in this year, because it is currently being voted on to use the results of the Drop-in games for the seeding for the group phase of the tournament.

In the Humanoid Teen Size League 10 teams are qualified. We are taking part in this league with our cooperation partner the WF Wolves. In this league 8 teams are fully qualified and 2 teams are only qualified for the Drop-in games.

All teams, their qualification videos, Team Description Paper as well as the robot specifications can be seen here:
https://www.robocuphumanoid.org/hl-2019/teams/

We are very excited to take part in the championship in Sydney and are very hopeful to be very successful in this year!

We have applied for the world cup of RoboCup, which will be in Sydney this year. We have written a Team Description Paper for this purpose, in which we are presenting our research of the last year. We have also made a video for our application. We are very happy to have been accepted and to be able to fly to Sydney in juli and for the exciting games we will get to play.

We are already preparing a lot for the world cup. We have had multiple integration tests in the last few months. In the integration tests we have tested all of our hard- and software. We are also already planning the next integration test.

By changing to our new robot platform, from our Minibots to our new Wolfgang robots, we have had to fight with some new problems. On the other hand we also were more motivated and that is why we managed to accomplish a lot of progress in our software as well as in the continued development of the Wolfgang hardware platform.

As part of working on our software, we have overhauled our vision. It is now better able to process and calculate the results of our CPU and graphics card in parallel.
At the moment multiple bachelor thesis are being worked on, which aim to use Fully Convolutional Neural Networks, to detect additional objects on the field. We aim to also detect robots and goalposts with this method.
The localization of our robot is being completely changed and improved right now. For this we use AMCL, a particle filter, to transform linepoints which have been found by our vision. A live demonstration video is available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/BtVlmNuFCGd/
Additionally to our localization we are also working on a world model. We aim to process the sensor input data from multiple robots and use the data to look at how the ball moved over time, which allows us to filter if we detect e.g. the ball in one place where it couldn’t possible be based on our previous measurements.
We have completely rewritten our behavior. We have developed a new description language which will allow us easier continued development of our behavior. For this we have developed our Dynamic Stack Decider and are currently working on publishing a paper about it.
For our path planning, the calculation which route our robot should take, we have switched to move_base.
For our animations and our walking we have switched to using splines. By using splines we are able to calculate smaller steps between the start of the motion and finishing the motion. This allows us to have less jerky movements.
We managed to send our motors significantly more signals per second. This way we are able to decide in more detail how the motor should move and thus accomplish a more precise movement in general.
We have built new foot sensors into our robots. By looking at the additional data we are generating this way we can stabilise our walking and our animations.
In the context of a bachelor thesis we are currently working on a system to calibrate our motors. Small inaccuracies between a measurement and the reality lead to large differences in how the robot is actually oriented. With this method large differences have already been found and fixed.

For the Symposium of the RoboCup world cup we are planning on a few more scientific papers. We will talk about these more at a later point in time and upload them on our publications page.

Our code is open source and can be viewed on Github:
https://github.com/bit-bots

We will take part in the German Open before we fly to Sydney. We will test our hard- and software there in detail and are excited for games we will get to play in Magdeburg.

Additionally to this Blog, Facebook and Twitter we will also publish images on Instagram. Our new Instagram page can be found here:
https://www.instagram.com/hhbitbots/

Our robots have gotten new foot sensors. We were inspired by Team Rhoban from Bordeaux. ( https://github.com/Rhoban/ForceFoot )

We have improved on the original implementation. The possible update rate has been improved from the original 80 Hz to a theoretically possible 9.5 kHz. Our transfer rate through the bus is limited and thus we filter the output from the load cells and only transfer with a speed of 1 kHz.

We have put the Sensors  on the top side of the feet of our robots.

We have implemented the sensors to help us gather more data and use this data to improve our walking and our animations by making them more stable.
We have put the sensors on our robots on the RoHOW. The sensors are able to measure 40 KG each without breaking. Of course we took that as a challenge and used two thumbs to create as much pressure as possible. There was not enough space near the sensors to use more than just two thumbs.

In the future we plan to scientifically compare how our measured center of pressure compares to an industrial 6 axis force torque sensor and publish our results. In the near future we also plan to release our improved version of the ForceFoot as opensource hardware.

We have finished our application video for the RoboCup 2019. You can find it here:

In the last few days, interested teenagers got to try out, what it is like to study computer science at our university. And like the last years, we offered one of the three projects the pupils could choose from.  During this week, they did not just get a look at our daily lifes, but instead got to experience hands on, what it takes to make a robot play soccer.

Our new friend Cozmo, a robot produced by Anki, joined us for this years project, and thanks to its intuitive programming environment made it rather easy for the students to solve various problems and to programm and play games with or against Cozmo. Step by step they helped Cozmo to reach his dream goal to become a soccer star player.

In contrast to the last years, this time we tried a different learning concept, developed by a master student at our university. In various tasks the 13 children first learned how to work with the robot and his graphical programming environment, before later going on to use a “real” programming language. The main goal was to make Cozmo shoot a goal on friday.

Even though this was a challenging task, the students quickly recognized how to use Cozmos sensors to find the ball in the camera image, then calculate the position in the real world, to then figure out where he is supposed to move.

Besides working on the project, the pupils were also keen to see our campus, so we showed them around in the labs of TAMS. They got to control a robotic arm with a HoloLense and watch as Trixie searched for interestingly colored objects.

Even though our last article was a while ago, a lot has happened. After the group phase we were eliminated from the regular competition of the world cup in a match against Rhoban from France.
We were more successful in the Drop-In Challenge: because of our stable goal keeper we managed to finish in the 4. place.

Afterwards we supported our collaboration partners in the team WF Wolves from Wolfenbüttel, who played in the TeenSize League. They finished the group phase in the third place and thus got directly to the semi final. There we cooperatively lost against the team Ichiro from Indonesia. The match for the third place against the Nubots from Australia ended in a penalty shootout which we unfortunately lost. In the Drop-In Challenge in the TeenSize League we were more successful and managed to finish in third place.

In the KidSize League Rhoban has managed to become World  Cup champion for the third time. In the TeenSize League Ichiro became the World Cup champion for the ninth time.

After the competition many members of our team spent a few more days in Canada before we went back to Hamburg. In the near future we plan to extend our cooperation with the Wolves. In September they will visit us and we will play test games and work together on scientific papers.