A second second place. We are second in the Technical Challenges

We've won another second place. At every RoboCup championship are also Technical Challenges. This year we had three:

1. Drop-In Player: A team has to implement an extra protocol where players of different teams are playing together versus another mixed team.
2. Open Challenge: Present your own research field or implemented ideas. The best idea is voted.
3. Passing Challenge: You have to pass a ball between three robots.

This was our (unofficial) price. Thanks guys!

 

Final: HTWK vs. BHuman -- 2:6

We've done it. We were in the final!!! It was exhausting to scream at our robots what they should do ;) After the first half the result was 2:1 for BHuman, in the second half we scored our second goal and the game ended 6:2.

So this is the first time in team history we are the second in the world!!!! :D

The team this year (from left back to front):  Thomas Reinhardt, Philipp Freick, Samuel Eckermann, Tobias Kalbitz, Hannes Hinerasky, Jörg Schließer,  Hannah Müller, Rico Tilgner. Not here: Stefan Seering, Michael Wünsch, Lucas Stadler, Jonas Mende.

We'd like to thank our Alma Mater the HTWK and our faculty for all the support and believing in us!. Also we like to thank all the sponsors who made it possible that we all can be here. Also a huge THANK YOU to all the volunteers who looked out for us and helped us to accommodate. Especially we like to thank Duncan ten Velthuid and Katie Genter who spent so much effort in the preparations and made the RoboCup 2013 SPL championship work flawlessly.

You are free to use the photos for articles, blogs, etc.

FINALE!!!

We scored 5:1 in a very exciting game against rUNSWift and are in the FINALE!!!!

Implementing the team strategy for a 5th player over night helped a lot and that gamble really paid off! :-) Oh, and we fixed two segfaults (bugs that made our software crash) 10 minutes before the game. ;-)

The finale will be at 12:00.

From quarter finals to semi finals!

We passed the quarter finals by winning 8:0 vs. team DAInamite. At 9 am (in half an our) our semifinal starts. We play against rUNSWift from New South Wales, Australia, which we last met in the quarter finals at RoboCup 2011 in Istanbul.

Last night we changed a large part of our strategy, and now everyone is nervous whether it'l work. We're doing last tests.

LIVE-STREAM

Hey all, we'll have the live-Stream from RoboCup on our game at 7pm! It's quarterfinals, so don't miss!

robocuptv.org

It's getting crowded

It's getting damn crowded here. Many people on the tribunes around us, an announcer talking loudly about a game, photographers and TV everywhere, people shouting, robots talking, whistles.... And still some of us manage to do some serious work!

This is the sight of one of our team members.

And that's our table:

Our next game is at 7pm tonight, against Dainamite. So see you later :)

HTWK vs. NTU RoboPAL 4:2

Another game, another win. Actually we were already first in our group, so the outcome was not important for us - but the game was one of the most thrilling so far.

NTU RoboPAL was also doing passes, and they where quite precise (or at least looked like this ;) ) Also their walk is about as fast as ours. So in the end we won 4:2 in a exciting game.

Video will come soon, stay tuned!

Video - HTWK vs Nao Devils, First Half

As promised earlier, here the video of the first half against Nao Devils:

HTWK vs Berlin United ... 5:0!!!

And another win for us! :-) That's it for today, our next game will be tomorrow at 12:20 against NTU RoboPAL.

Video: HTWK vs. RoboCanes, 1st Half

The first half of the second game in the first group stage.

Queen Máxima visits the SPL

Queen Máxima of the Netherlands just visited our Standard Platform League at the RoboCup Eindhoven 2013.

 

After we had cleaned everything for her, we collected all Naos from all teams, and set up a really nice Photo.

HTWK vs. Nao Devils ... 6:1!!!

We're just returning from a very exciting game against Nao Devils. This was the first game of the 2nd group phase and we won 6:1!!! We'll try to upload the game today, so you guys have something to watch in the evening. :-)

Queen Máxima visits RoboCup

Today Queen Máxima will visit the RoboCup, and she will pass by our table!




We just had to clean the narrow corridor for her, and some nice organizers helped ;)












Look forward to our fotos :D

Video: HTWK vs. UChile, 2nd half

The 2nd half of our first game is now available as well!

Video: HTWK vs. UChile, 1st half

Thanks to the fast internet, we already have the first half of our game against UChile cut and on YouTube!

2nd Game, 2nd Win! :-)

We just finished playing our game against RoboCanes from Miami and won 5:0!

This means we'll advance to the second group phase, skipping the Intermediate Round that takes place until lunch tomorrow.

Our next game is Friday at 14:40 against Nao Devils or Northern Bites.
We'll also upload the first videos this evening.

First victory captured - HTWK vs UChile 8:0

We just won the first official game of this year's RoboCup with 8:0 against UChile. Yey :D

Halftime against UChile

Stream online!

There is a stream online from the RoboCup. It shows different leagues of the RoboCup alternatingly. Check out, but mute before.. ;)

www.robocuptv.nl

Being Visitor at the robocup

So you are a visitor at the RoboCup, what can you do? This year especially the architecture and setup of the championship venue is interesting. There is some empty space between the different leagues which is used to create a quiet environment where you can calm down. Also there is an extra food area where you can buy Lunch or Dinner.  You can also find some unique robots. For example there is a complete robot band present.

Of course the exhibitors and sponsors have booths. For all different age groups exist interesting workshop tracks and of course there are all the games from the different leagues. Highlight for the youngest ones are the Pleos. Robot dinosaurs which can act as a pet. See for yourselves:

Third preparation day ends

This was our third and last preparation day. The official games will start tomorrow. In the last few days we tuned our team strategy, adapted our walking and vision. We played a few test games and won each one. This is great! But we saw so much more potential for improvements. Also a few interesting projects from our team members are on their way which will improve our game even more.

We also talked about the upcoming plan for 2014 and on. We decided that we will do a tick/tock model. Last year we implemented a complete architecture, this year we improved our game play and subsystems, 2014 we will review our architecture and will adapt it to the requirements.

New this year: We have internet the whole time!:D We finally have a managed switch which protects the teams from network configuration errors. Also the wifi hotspots are managed by trained personnel. We as team shared our experiences from the last robocups and adapted with his help the wifi configuration so the wifi was working flawless this evening. You see on the image above the new jerseys for the Naos. We have to switch them on every half-time.

Open Challenge, Timetable and Results

We participated at the Open Challenge (like every year :)). Our presentation was about "Sparse Feature Learning for Visual Robot Angle Estimation" . After the results came back we've got a solid second place after BHuman.

The timetable for the upcoming days is ready as well as the result page. We try to upload the games as fast as possible in our YouTube channel.

And at the end: This is the whole SPL this year:

r

Playing Schedule

Just some appointments:

Today the Open Challenge starts at 3pm.  We are going to present our robot detection, which not only determines the position of the other robots, but also the viewing direction of them.

Tomorrow our first matches are scheduled: 11 am versus UChile (from Santiago, Chile) and 14:20 versus RoboCanes (from Miami, USA)

Besides: 

The Local Organising Chair Duncan (left,
carrying his tablet in his pocket ;)

The guy responsible for the wifi configuration
is hunting for illegal wifi networks

Kicking Off RoboCup 2013

Yesterday we arrived in Eindhoven (The Netherlands) after a short trip of 3.5 hours from our stop-over in Frankfurt.

The space in the hall is a bit limited, as you can see in the pictures below, but the infrastructure is fabulous. Finally some proper wifi hardware and a good internet connection to upload videos!
But like every year they shut down the light in the hall too early (at 11 PM). ;-) But this didn't prevent us from taking the robots to the hotel. Our crazy coder-guys fixed bugs until 5 (!) AM, while we left the hotel at 8:30 this morning. Today we are looking forward to the first test games. Let's see!

Tables of Bembelbots (left) and us (right)

2 of the 4 SPL-Soccerfields

Resume Frankfurt Science Night

Our trip to Frankfurt was very helpful as we encountered some unknown problems and tested some new features in a real game.

Who would have guessed, light which is sufficient for humans can be so weak for robots, that they almost turn blind? That turned out to be one of the major problems as to why the first match at the Night of Science ended without a single goal. As for the rest of the night we played three more showgames, keeping not too tight to the official RoboCup rules ;)

The night was a full success, with many visitors at our field, so all that remains is that we are very grateful to the Bembelbots and the organisers for giving us this opportunity and their hospitality, and for the fun we had together :D

     

Night of Science - First Game 0:0

The first game of this night just ended 0:0.

Both teams had huge problems with light reflections on the field, which, as you can see, looked quite a bit like the white field lines.


We even tried to cover them with long rolls of cardboard and a pin board, but it wouldn't help.





But of course we also tested some experimental code, so let's see what the next game will bring ;)

Night of Science

And we're on the road again!


















The "Bembelbots" (Nao-Team of Frankfurt) invited us to the "Night of Science" organised by the students of the Goethe University Frankfurt. Since 5pm we are playing games, presenting the robots, entertaining kids and of course coding.

We'll be here until 6am, if we don't run out of coffee before that ;)











And as you can see in the pictures, we finally have a real teamshirt!

Spreadshirt sponsored us with 24 Shirts, thanks a lot!

German Open 2013: After the Games

After 5 long and exhausting days we finally returned to Leipzig. The tension of yesterday's games still remains in our heads and we took home a lot of impressions and ideas from this very satisfying event.

Now we are looking forward to the upcoming World Championships in July where we hope to see as thrilling games as in Magdeburg.

2nd place!!!

In a very competitive match we managed to score two goals against the former world champion B-Human and have therefore successfully claimed the second place in the German Open 2013.

After a very strong first half (score: 1:1) B-Human successfully defended their position at the head of the German Open competition with a final score of 7:2.

5:0 vs SPQR: We're in the finals!

We defeated the Italian team SPQR in the semi finals with an overwhelming score of 5:0.

After finishing the preliminary rounds, we are the team holding the second best overall score of 7, scored the second most goals of 18 and have the second biggest goal difference of 15.

The final match will be held at 15:00. Let's hope for an as interesting match.

We are in the semifinals!

The last Game of the day was our best so far!
We won 8:0 against the team DAInamite from Berlin.

Tomorrow we play against SPQR from Italy 

in the semifinal 

at 10 o'clock !

You can watch it at our Livestream:
http://robocup.imn.htwk-leipzig.de/pages/livestream.php?lang=de

Wish us luck!

Win!

We just won against Team Bembelbots (from Frankfurt)! Score 7:0 - yeah!

This really is a reward for the hard work and insufficient sleep of the past days!











Besides coding we always inspire people for humanoid robots and studies at HTWK-Leipzig

10:50 o'clock: A Draw

We did a draw against RoboEireann: 3:3. But they played with 4 Robots while we only used 1 :)

Okay.. maybe we should use more, but this way Starbuck could present himself in the best light ;)

First Match at 10:50

Don't miss it - Stream is online: http://robocup.imn.htwk-leipzig.de/pages/livestream.php?lang=de

The first match starts at 10:50 but because we could only test our Nao on the big field two times before today, we still have Problems with localization.
But we do our best to solve this problem as fast as possible.

And then there was darkness. Nao at night
(At Midnight the light was shutdown so we couldn't test anymore. Such a pitty!)

Livestream - Coming on Friday!

As mentioned before our games will be streamed, so you can watch them live! On our homepage the Livestream Link is ready, and the stream will get active on Friday.
http://robocup.imn.htwk-leipzig.de/pages/livestream.php?lang=de

Don't miss our first match Friday at 10:50.

Besides we were interviewed from a Reporter from MDR-Jump - you can hear it Friday, between 12-14 o'clock, exact time will be announced soon.

RoboCup GermanOpen 2013 in Magdeburg

Today we started really too early in the morning from Leipzig.

But thanks to this we now have much time for coding here in Magdeburg.
Now we can check and test the Software with the Nao's on the new big field!
We hope for good games on the following days.




On Saturday a Television-Team from MDR is going to be here and make a transmission.







You can watch it on the same day at 4 o'clock on MDR (German TV). Check:

http://www.mdr.de/tv/programm/sendung250562.html

German Open: Robocup 2013 Kickoff

We are all looking forward to the Robocup 2013. The first step will be the German Open in Magdeburg from April 26th to April 28th. Stay tuned for the new features we planned this year: revised teamplay and livestreams on our website. Further information will be available soon.

Supplement: CeBIT 2013

We were pleased to welcome the prime minister of Saxony, Stanislaw Tillich, at our stand at the CeBIT 2013. He was very interested the NAOs, the team and what we achieved. 

Looks like he found a friend in Starbuck.

Cebit 2013

We are part of the Cebit 2013. You can find us in Halle 9 Stand A10. Yesterday three different television stations and the press interviewed us. It's a great opportunity to show our work to the public and also that the HTWK Leipzig encourage students to create and work in interesting projects. Here some impressions of our booth and our team.