No tomfoolery allowed! Children are present?

This weekend we host our annual introductory course for the young and upcoming students of our university, HTWK Leizpig. We offer the visitors the chance to experience a small piece of RoboCup. Trying out the Robots. Working with our robotics into course. Learning exciting skills.

For such a serious occasion we are all professionals of course. Dressed well and addressing each other with high regard. Surely no silly jokes at all are being exchanged for danger of tainting the young students’ minds.

RoHOW 2019 - last Day (another Testgame)

It's the last day at RoHOW 2019 in Hamburg. We arranged a second testgame against Team Bembelbots from Frankfurt. We won 3:0, and our friendship was not bothered by this. We are still happy to share the same desk at the team area.

After three very nice days, with very nice people, we say thank you to the Team HULKs for the organization, the friendly atmosphere and of course for the food and drinks.

RoHOW 2019 - Second Day (with Testgame)

Today we met with our friends and strongest competitors: Team B-Human. They wear very cool T-shirts. I don't know what happend to mine. 😁

I visited two self hosted talks here at RoHOW. The first discussed ball detection using neural networks and the other discussed behavior engineering. At the moment, neural networks for image recognition and image segmentation are commonly used on the Nao hardware. The Bit Bots from the Robocup Humanoid Kid-Size League presented a more debuggable strategy framework. Their paper is on the roadway to being published.

Later during the day, we arranged a testgame with B-Human on the new field. After falling behind 0:1, we managed a achive 1:1 tie at the end. Our localization and behavior worked surprisingly well with the new dimensions of the penalty area and the position of the penalty spot.

RoHOW 2019 - Meet & Greet

Today we are visiting the RoHOW 2019 and have arrived in Hamburg at the TUHH (Technical University of Hamburg). After a friendly welcome of the other teams we prepared ourselves for the workshops and test games during the next two days.

For the field, the new measurements are used. So we tested our localization. Luckily everything worked fine. We hope for exciting games tomorrow.

Coding & Robotics 4Kids

On tuesday, the 19. of  Nov. we presented our robots at a great event aimed at popularizing and teaching robotics to children. The Hftl in Leizpig was happy to welcome out Nao Robots. We were visited by pupils from grade three to grade ten and had a lot of fun. We presented videos from our latest championship and explained how our robots work, how the robots recognize position of the ball and how they decide to pass the ball instead of shooting towards the goal. The chances to control the robot on their own was very popluar with all the schoolkids. In the end the kids realized that scoring a goal isn't as easy as it looks, even with the advantages that the human eye offers. Robots playing soccer autonomously were as impressive for the children as they were for their parents.  Films with robots taking over the world were also broght up by some of the older children. But for now, we don't plan to implement that feature. ;)

The Rome Maker Faire Family :-D

Here we have all teams present at the Maker Faire in Rome: SPQR, NomadZ and Nao-Team HTWK

That's all from us. Tobias, Stefan, Caro, Marvin and Thomas will use the day tomorrow to explore ancient Rome. We will head back home on Tuesday. Have fun and see you soon :-D

Making winners

With the Maker Faire concluding the award ceremony was in order. In accordance with the maker spirit permeating the halls the trophies for all robot teams were artisanally crafted at the venue.

We are happy to conclude our time at Maker Faire Rome and soon will carry out 1st place trophy home. We thank team NomadZ from Zürich and team SPQR from Rome for the great games.

Happy children all around

The exhibition continues to be a delight. The Robot Teams enjoy the venue as much as the young visitors do. Every game the Soccer Robots are cheered on from all sides.

With the day coming to a close we just finished the exhibition shootout. All teams were happy to show off their Penalty Shootout Skills.

At the moment we are preparing for the finals at 17 o'clock. Rome turned out to be a great place for a small fall tournament with local RoboCup Teams.

Results Sunday

FInd results from sunday here:
http://spqr.diag.uniroma1.it/?page_id=699

Group Phase - NomadZ

Here is our second game of the competition against Team NomadZ. The audience was absolutely thrilled and cheered us on... "H T W K... H T W K"... cool! We are very satisfied with the result 4:1.

Group Phase - SPQR

The first game on the event was very exciting, because there were still some heavy problems with the wifi.

Meeting team SPQR in their Home Arena

Playing Robot Soccer in Rome means teams SPQR feels at home. Team SQPR is based at Sapienza Università di Roma and was our first opponent.

The first half went well for us and ended with one goal scored for us. Team SQPR caught up to us in the second half and the match ended 1:1.

The sidelines were crowded with fair visitors when the penalty shootout started. Courious about the eventual winner people watched robots from both teams taking shots in turn. Team SPQR had problems recognizing the ball during the shootout. Resulting in Nao-Team HTWK winning 3:1.

Teambuilding

This evening we did some communicational team building, because the last time we had meet is a few months ago. Therefore we used a multiplayer game which requires the communication between two or more people.

Keep talking and nobody explodes 😇

Heading towards Rome

This weekend we were invited to visit the Maker Faire Exhibition in Rome. Compared to recent RoboCup World Championships the city of Rome is a short trip for us.

Nevertheless, the journey was quite perilous. Due to problems with trains one of our human members nearly missed their flight. In the end our last team member arrived at the plane just before the cabin door was about to close. With all aboard Rome was reached in the end.

Presentation Ceremony

Last but not least here are some impressions of the presentation ceremony. And some more pictures you have not seen yet. 😁
Thank you everyone for being with us during the RoboCup 2019 adventure. 💖

Thank you all for the awesome RoboCup 2019 experience

Mixed Team Finals: Team Team vs B&B

After the the Champions Cup finals, there was still a match left for us and our friends BembelBots. The Mixed-Team finals! Team Team Team vs. B&B (B-Human & Berlin United). Both teams managed to achieve the same match score in the Mixed Team group phase.

All in all was this match very even. 20 Minutes game-play ended up in a 0:0 score. So a Mixed-Team penalty shootout was needed to decide this game. Unfortunately even the shootout ended in a draw 2:2. This case kind of broke the rule book.. 😅 So the referees and the teams decided to do a "Sudden Death" shootout (with no limitation).
We decided to finish this game as a team, so we prepared the goal keeper to be from Bembelbots and a kicker from us. Sadly Team B&B was not brave enough to finish this as a team too and decided to just pick B-Human players (the new champion 2019). So overall we lost this game with a final score of 2:3.

Nevertheless we are very happy to be a part of Team Team Team. We had so much fun. So big thanks for BembelBots 😙💖💪 

Finals vs. B-Human

We had an awesome match against B-Human. The first half was very even and we managed to hold a 1:0 score for us until half time.
Unfortunately in the middle of the second half some of our robots were starting to fall over all the time. So we only had at most of the time three players on the field. This was a very good chance for B-Human to finish the game with a 1:2 score.

So we are the Vice-Champion 2019 😁 Of course we are sad. But we are more happy about what we have achieved this year.

So for the rest of the day: Party Time 😁

Semi-Final vs. Nao Devils

A long long night came to an end.. Our "Ball teacher" Tobi and Rico had round about 3h hours of sleep. At 10:00 on a foggy day in Sydney were our robots ready to play on Field E..

We are in the finaaaaaaaals!! We won the match against Nao Devils with a very incredible score of 8:0!!! On the semi final the whole team is way more in tense, then in the finals 😅 But we did it! Whoop~ Whoop~💖
The whole match was dominated by us. We had very minor issues with "False Balls", but these were handled by our team strategy without a problem. All in all
we can say for sure that our robots are at their best game-play ever.

We try to make the Ball Detector even better until the finals, but in general we are going to face B-Human without further changes. So lets see if we are able to pull off a win against them again 💪😁

The night before the semi finals

Last Day Schedule

Hey everyone! Here is the schedule for tomorrow. How ever it goes out, we are going to play two matches. Wish us luck! We do everything we can to bring the champion's title back home a second time. 💪💖
So see you tomorrow! For us it will be a long night.. so we hopefully find the one and only ball on the field 😅

Quarter Finals vs. Austin Villa

Hooray!! Semi finals here we go!!~ We managed to pull of a 10:0 in the quarter finals against UT Austin Villa.
When you take a look at the first half of the match, you may think "How can this end up in a 10:0?" There are two conditions, which made our robots a lot of troubles during the first half.

The first one is still the ball detection.. We are basically hacking our a** off to prevent the detection of "false" balls. But ... its difficult 😒 The other bad thing was the field side. Every time we play on Field D, we have troubles with the window side. We call this side "shiny", because everything looks very shiny that causes our ball detector to be even more worse...

So please check out our video and see what happens if we play on a good 😈 or bad 😱 field side.

Team Team vs. SPQR-Starkit

Our last match was against the Teams Starkit and SPQR. Unintentionally we took over the role of the defender and the BembelBots scoled all the goals 😜 This game ended in a 4:0 for us 😎

Team Team vs. SwiftArk

The third game was against Team SwiftArk, which is the fusion on rUNSWift and TJArk.
Here we won the match with a score of 3:1.

Team Team vs. DevilSMASH

The second match for Team Team Team was against Team DevilSMASH, which is the fusion of NaoDevils and HULKs.
You really have to watch this match! It was a very exciting game and beautiful team play 💖

We won this game 2:1

Team Team vs. B&B

Our first mixed team match was against Team B&B, which is the fusion of Berlin United and B-Human.
Besides winning - we as Team Team Team had the main goal to play together as a team. So we mixed up the positions to have offensive and defensive player from BembelBots and us.
What do you think? Did we managed to look like one single team? 😁

tl;dr: It was an awesome game and ended up in a 1:1 draw.

Mixed Team Challenge

There is one more thing.. that we haven't shown you, yet. In parallel to the champion's cup of the SPL, we also participate in another competition called "Mixed Team Challenge". The idea is to form a new team out of two regular teams and each team provides three robots for a match (so in total are 6 robots playing for one mixed team).
So we mixed up with our friends BembelBots like last year (we only had to convince the league to change the rules for us 😉 so its allowed to mix with the same team as the year before) But at least we changed the name from "Team Team" to "Team Team" (we swooped the Team's around 😇)

I highly suggest you to take a look at these games videos! They are very exciting!! 😁

Competition Day 3 - Our Schedule

Whoop! Whoop! We managed to take the first place of our group again! This is our ticket directly into the quarter finals, which is the only game of us tomorrow.

Also we like to share an overview to give you a feeling of which teams we maybe going to face the next days. (copied from the result website)

Second Group Phase - match against Berlin United

Meeting our old friend Berlin United was always thrilling for us in the past and still is. Because of this and the small time between the games, we didn't try anything new and played with the same software as in the second half against NomadZ.
But still we had a new upcoming challenge to face during the match.. the sunset. Our match was perfectly scheduled to the full light variety from day to night (of course with addition headlights)

So please enjoy the sunset and.. the game 😋 We managed to pull of an awesome 5:0 score *we love these new kicks* 💖

If you like please leave a comment. For example: what do you think about our header goal in the second half of the game? 😎

Second Group Phase - match against NomadZ

Holy cow, what should i start with? To prepare the game we worked on our "Ball Detector", as you may remember from yesterday posts. The good news are.. we found lots of balls 💣 The bad news are.. most of these balls were actually robots💥 So the first half of the game was a disaster 💀
Our keeper had a super functionality called "Side Switcher", which tells another teammate when she/he is dribbling towards our goal (if he sees the ball near our goal).
Guess what happens, when our keeper detects mistakenly a ball inside our defender and in the same time our striker is almost scoring a goal (with the real ball)! 😱 Correct! Our striker is going to play towards our goal until the keeper tells him to turn again.. And this went on and on and on 😨 And ended in a 0:0.

But as you know us, we wont let this happening in the second half as well. We did everything possible within the 10 minutes half time to fixed this behavior and to prepare the robots for the second half.
To save you from these heart attack triggers, we decided to show you only the second half of the game 😇 which ended in a 5:0 score for us 😎

Bedtime

Another day was passing by very very.. very quickly. We like to thank you for still joining us on our RoboCup 2019 journey 💖

So today we like to take you inside the venue and wish you a good day (or night 😜)

Second Group Phase Schedule

Hey everyone :) This is our schedule for tomorrow. Our new group will be "Group H" and the results can still be found here: https://spl.robocup.org/results-2019/

Also tomorrow we have to be the referee in three additional games 😎

The early bird - stands up fast

What we haven't told you... At the preparation days we noticed that our robots aren't able to stand up at all 😈
Fortunately in our team are two motion hero's! In not even 2 hours in the morning Marvin and Thomas managed to teach the robots an awesome Stand-Up-Motion, which is super fast and stable.

You can see the result in our videos 😀

Marvin and Thomas teaching the motions step by step and in slow-mo

Videos - As promised

If you couldn't watch the live stream, maybe because the bed was still warm and comfortable 😇. Here are the videos from our games of competition day 1.

We hope you enjoy them and feel free to leave comment or like 💖

 vs. Naova

vs. TJark

Ball Control & Kick Demo

Some impressions of our dribbling and new kick behaviour.

First Group Phase - Winner of Group B

Whoop Whoop!~ 😁 We are happy to announce that we have won our last game in the first group phase. TJark is a really good team, but we were able to win this match with a 6:0 score! (Our last match against them in 2017 was a close 2:1)

 

Compared to our first match in the morning, we had no issues anymore with the field border and the localization in general. Another thing to pin point: This was (most likely) our first match with no penalty given to our robots!! Yay!~ 😎 (As you may know.. Usually we are more or less the champion of pushings...)

But there is still a lot of room for improvement. One example is the ball detection. Currently we detect from time to time balls in robots, which confuses the team strategy. But until now the strategy was able to deal with it. So lets hope that we can fix this today evening 😇

Spectacular Kick-off for RoboCup 2019!

The first competition just started there at Sydney. Naova was scheduled as our first opponent of RoboCup 2019. We were very eager to see Naova perform at the competition since this is our first meeting of the Canadian team since last year’s competition.

Attack towards the goal line boy HTWK Robots

During the match Naova has major problems controlling the ball. Thus, we were able to dominate the field with our new kicking feature and won the match 10:0. We are very happy with the outcome of the first match and work hard to repeat the score in further games. Our next opponent will be TJArk from China. Feel free to watch the match at 06:00 in Germany (or 14:00 in Sydney) on YouTube.

Heading into the night.

It was a long day and we are prepared for our first games tomorrow. So see you at 02:00 in Germany (or 10:00 in Sydney) at our first game (don't forget the live stream) 😉

Into Darkness!

Unfortunately the fair turned off the lights early today and we were left in the dark. But the whole league found creative solutions to deal with this challenge.

Tomorrow we try to convince the fair to keep the lights on till a quarter before eleven so we can work the day to the fullest (pun intended ;-))

Happy colourful Nao-Party

All of these Nao's have gathered together to proudly show their team jersey's to all robot and human participants. The idea is, that nobody is going to be surprised about all these awesome jerseys during the competition. 😎

So? Did you find our robots in the image? 😁

It's Poster Time!

Since this year every team has to prepare a poster in addition to the robot soccer skills. This poster shall hold an interesting topic, which the corresponding team is working on.

Our poster presents the near obstacle detection, which was freshly developed for this RoboCup. But has its roots in last years poster (where the poster was voluntary)
Please Have a look :-)

 

First Outdoor Testgame

We tested today our new deep learning network for the field border. It works flawless and also all other features are ready. So we left this game satisfied by our work and celebrate via some cookies.

Competition Day 1 - Our Schedule

The competition starts on 04.07.2019 with the following games for our team:

In addition Stefan and Flo are going to be the referee in two further games. Of course we will keep you updated. If you want to have a sneak peak you can always have a look in the official schedule on the SPL website.

Ready to rock this fair and square

Results and Livestream

We are happy to share the result table of Robocup 2019. At the beginning you find us in Group B. https://spl.robocup.org/results-2019/

Also we like to give special thanks to NaoDevils from Dortmund. They set up a live stream on each field. So you are able to watch every game.
Regarding the time difference: Please keep in mind, that you can only see the last 4 hours of a YouTube live stream.
The stream(s) can be found here: NaoDevils YouTube Channel

Of course we try to upload videos of our matches as fast as we can (maybe these are already available in the time you wake up in Germany 😋) please check here: NaoTeam HTWK YouTube Channel

Heading into the night

After a long and successful day we heading towards our hotel. See you all tomorrow. 😀