Nao-Team HTWK : NTU Robot PAL - 2 : 4!

Deja vu! We've lost against NTU, again, and again with 2 : 4! This results in an overall 4th place for us (out of 27 teams)! With this result we've achieved a new high-score for our team! This years world championship was so great and we are so happy about our achievements! Also, kudos to our other team members, who couldn't be here, namley Manuel, Samuel, Martin, Hannah, Sandra, Christoph and Katja, and of course huge thanks to our advising professors, Prof. Klaus Bastian and Prof. Karl-Udo Jahn, the Leipzig University of Applied Sciences for financial support as well as this years sponsors: malberg EDV-Systemberatung, EUREGEX and focus GmbH! Now it's time for us to become "social" again, to celebrate with the others and last but not least to get some sleep! :-)

Update: Videos of the games are published successively within the blog posts that contains game results.

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Teams of the Standard Platform League, 2011

Nao-Team HTWK : B-Human - 0 : 5!

It was a great game though we've lost 0 : 5 against the former world champion! According to B-Human we've been their "hardest" opponent until now. This is very nice to hear and we've tried our best to keep them struggling! The second game in the semifinal is NTU Robot PAL (with a B-Human code base) against Nao Devils, which will start in about 15 min. We are very curious about our opponent in the final game at noon for the 3rd place.

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Impressions from today ...

The open challenge is over by now and we are done touching the source code of our robots. :-) After these last intense moments, we will grab some beers with our last opponents and the rest of the RoboCup teams. Good night fellas. :-)

Some more pictures from today:

Nao-Team HTWK : rUNSWift - 5 : 2! YES, YES, YES!!!

Guys, we've won against the former vice world champion, rUNSWift, with 5 : 2! So awesome! We are all so thrilled! The video will be online soon! With this win, we've reached the semifinals! The game is tomorrow 9 am against B-Human. By the way ... three German teams have reached the semifinals!

Thomas, you owe us a bottle of whiskey! :-)


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Nao-Team HTWK : WPI - 7 : 0!

Quarterfinal!!! We've won against WPI and are first in the Second Round Robin Round! With this, we've reached the quarterfinal of this world championship and belong to the top 8 teams (out of 27)! We are so happy about this! Amazing! The next game, this time within quarterfinal, will be against team rUNSWift from Australia! Tough challenge! Stay tuned!


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Nao-Team HTWK : CMurfs - 5 : 1!

Yeaaaahh!!! We've won against CMurfs (Carnegie Mellon University) with 5 : 1! Awesome! :-)

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Nao-Team HTWK : WrightEagleUnleashed - 3 : 0!

Good news everyone, we've won against WrightEagleUnleashed with 3 : 0! Videos will be published soon. By the way, some videos of the last games can already be found within the related blog posts. Out next game will be at 11:40 am against CMurfs!


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Impressions of day 3

Day 3 is nearly over. We've won two out of two matches and reached the second intermediate round which will be challenged by tomorrow, so tomorrow will be the decision whether we will reach the quarterfinal or not. You may wish us success and a quantum of luck! :-) Our first game starts on 10 am against WrightEagleUnleashed. Stay tuned!

Nao-Team HTWK : L3M - 4 : 0!

We've won against L3M with 4 : 0! With the winning of this match, we got into the next round, namely 'Second Round Robin Pool' together with CMurfs, WPI and WrightEagleUnleashed. Our next game will be tomorrow 10 am against WrightEagleUnleashed!

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RoboCup Live Stream

A live stream from the RoboCup is also available here:

We're in TV ;-)

The RoboCup 2011 made it into the Turkish TV news. In the first two videos, you can see us or our robots (the ones with their arms behind their backs) in the background:

http://tv.interpress.com/video/9670599.mpg
http://tv.interpress.com/video/9670026.mpg
http://tv.interpress.com/video/9668878.mpg
http://tv.interpress.com/video/9668793.mpg

Nao-Team HTWK : Noxious-Kouretes - 3 : 0!

Today, we've won our first game this day against Noxious-Kouretes with 3 : 0! The game was very exciting and had some funny moments, too. Videos will be published soon. 2 minutes before the end, the robots lost their Wifi connection and ran chaos, but luckily no own goal was scored during this time. Well, it seems, that the Wifi issue still exists on our side. Next to this, other teams have also reported that their Video4Linux mmap(2) interface has problems getting new image frames due to bugs in the AMD video driver from Aldebaran. We've experienced same issues last year during development and therefore switched to the slower Aldebaran API with an optimized memcpy(2), so no problems on our side in this regard. (But please, please, please ... next time, use a WRT54GL!)

Anyways, our next game will be within the intermediate round against L3M on 3:40 pm.

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Taxi driving is the new rally driving!

Whenever you have the chance, grab a taxi in Istanbul - it's lots of fun! One could think, that the taxi drivers here were former rally drivers! We get here in approx. one-eight of the time compared to the usual shuttle bus and whenever a road sign says 30, the taxi drivers multiply this by 4! :-)

Day 2 nearly over ...

The second day is nearly over and we are about to be kicked out since it is nearly 11pm. We've lost one match and won one match, found lots of bugs in the current code and still continue to fix them. The issues with the uplink decreased, but are not gone so far. Lots of teams have problems with the Wifi connection between their robots and the fields Access Points. Once a robot has been kicked from the WLAN, it does not reconnect automatically and the wireless configuration/hardware(?) in general seems to be broken at all. Besides others, we've nearly spend two whole days fixing the networking on the robots, but we think we have solved this now.

And the most important thing: Happy birthday to Thomas! :-)

Stay tuned!

Nao-Team HTWK : Portuguese Team - 5 : 0!

We've won against the Portuguese Team with 5 : 0!

And again, ... continuous uplink problems to the ISP because of loops in the network! :-(

Our next game will be by tomorrow, 10:40 am against Noxious-Kouretes.

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Nao-Team HTWK : NTU Robot PAL - 2 : 4!

Our first match is over and sadly we have lost with 2 : 4. All in all, is was a fair game and NTU Robot PAL was a tough opponent.

On 5 pm we have our next game against the Portuguese team!

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Timetable

The timetable for the matches can be found on http://www.tzi.de/spl/bin/view/Website/Timetable2011 and results will be put here http://www.tzi.de/spl/bin/view/Website/Results2011.

Our first game will be against a very strong opponent, namely Team NTU Robot PAL from Taiwan. NTU took the B-Human code release and enhanced it on many aspects. They are also the only team we know of, who are able to locate their positions of a robot with the help of their other robots. By this, the Nao who dribbles the soccer ball doesn't need to locate himself and the goals in every situation - the other team mates might already have done this for him.

So you see our first game won't be easy for us - wish as luck! :-)

Türkiye'ye Hoşgeldiniz!

Hello! this is Casey again. I'm a Robot of the Nao-Team HTWK and I'd like to give you some impressions from the Contest like i did at the German Open this year.

We already arrived and settled down as you can read in the posts the humans of our team wrote earlier. The competition site is quite nice. We got four fields to play on like we did at the competition in Singapore last year. We already did some test runs on the fields. We still are able to track the ball across the field despite the different light conditions. The goalposts are a lot more sturdy than last year which is a good thing and the field lines are arranged properly.

We already did several big and small training session with other teams. We are quite happy with our progress so far but there is always room for improvement. Luckily we have found a very effective method to train a wide variety of skills at once. See a picture of a training session below.

A trip home, first testgames and a lot networking trouble

Yesterday, we left the Expo Center at 11pm and grabbed something to eat on the way. It is impressiv how the city changes its face by night. By day nobody seems to be on the street but at night ... life pulsates at every coner of the city. See yourself.

What should we say? Life is not that easy as it seems. There are days where everything is possible and the are days where the wireless network is broken beyond all repair. ;) But there also postive news. We completed already the first two test games against B-Human and MRL. As you can see, the test games were of some interest to the other teams. This was also a great opportunity to test our new code and we already found and fixed a few bugs. The rest of the day we will try to fix the wireless setup and prepare for our first real game tomorrow.

Day 1: The Setup

Soon, our first day will be over. Nearly the whole day, the uplink to the Internet/ISP was somehow broken (mostly due to loops in the network on unmanaged switches), but the "chaos" is finally decreasing. This years soccer fields got a bit too much yellow, but after a first check with our Naos, it seems pretty okay for us. Sadly, one has to take a longer walk for the next Starbucks or shopping opportunity and only a handful of people speak English in the whole area. Nevertheless, it's a very nice feeling to see old RoboCup faces and to exchange experiences and new ideas with our colleagues from all over the world.

Hello from Istanbul!

All team members are finally in Istanbul, some of them departed from Berlin, some from Belfast or Zurich - in the end we all met at the Istanbul airport. Our first impression of Istanbul was spectacular. A vibrant city that obviously never sleeps. So many people together in one place.
The registration of our robots at the customs was without any problems; they even had a large picture of a Nao sticked near their office, so that RoboCups participants immediately knew where to go.

After picking up our luggage, we faced our first challenges at the metro station with
buying tickets. Everything is Turkish and rarely people who speak English. A 'ticket' is defined as buying a chip (so called Jetons) for passing the barriers to the metro. We then check-in to our hotel which is near a big main road and the air corridor of the Ataturk airport. Nevertheless, the hotel room is really quite and very nice! After freshing up a bit, we've checked out the nearby area and had a light evening meal. We are already looking forward for tomorrow!

Good night, Nao-Team HTWK

Arriving at the airport

We checked in our luggage and wait to board our plane. Our other team mates do the same in Zürich and Belfast.

We are heading towards Berlin

Currently we are heading towards Berlin. We plan to hack the night on our robots and tomorrow at 11am we take off to Istanbul.