Wednesday, 13 August 2025

HTWK Robots & Nao Devils Super Team? Sounds super!

from rivals to friends to team colleagues!
when the Nao Devils arrived we had already been here for a week and to be honest, transporting our code from one robot to the next for months on end while trying to improve everything can be pretty rough on a sleep schedule - add in 2 trips halfway around the world and you're jet-lagged beyond human imagination. Oh and don't forget the World Championship we just played (and won). But things were going well and we were making steady progress.

However, we knew the Chinese teams who we would meet in the main tournament if we made it that far would require much, much more than what we had. Entering the stage: our team leader Rico! Joined by our computer science general extraordinaire and team founder it was time to get serious. At the same time, the Nao Devils also hit the scene and had to admit: trying to get the robots to play well starting from the demo code provided by the manufacturer would be virtually impossible on a new robo platform. 

So we got to thinking. We knew the elite univeristy teams from China are really familiar with the T1 and they developed an almost unstoppable kick that hits the high corners of the goal. Should it come to a penalty shoot out, we would be in serious trouble. 
That said, the Devils had just what we needed to get our goal sealed and our striker, well... striking: the ROS skills to unearth the motions from the robots that are buried in the developer packages, the maths to max out our ball tracking and the finesse to whip up brand new code to create our own custom behaviors. All that of course, while the rest of us were free to keep working on further improvements.

Ach ja, schon geil mit Profis zu Arbeiten! ♡

Der Teufel, Ja, er steckt wohl im Detail!
Mal fällt er rum, mal liegt er frei.
Er buckelt hoch, er streckt sich krumm,
er bleibt verrückt, dann piepst er stumm.

Emsig hackt die Elster auf ihn ein.
wie's kommen darf, so's kommen muss,
ein schneller Kick, ein guter Schuss.
Rundes, Eckiges: einfach rein.

Warum jetzt das auch noch in Versen?
In so komisch-krummen und in ganz Perversen?
Mephisto! Mephisto!
Glaub es oder nicht, es ist so,
Mal sehen was er noch so kann
mit den Kellerkindern fest in seinem Bann.



First Half against TechUnited ends 9:0 for...

well yeah, for us. But really only because the poor robots by TechUnited just wouldn't work so they had to leave their field empty for virtually the entire time :/
We hope they squash whatever stupid bug got into their code as quickly as possible!

HTWK Robots & Nao Devils vs. TechUnited, LIVE STREAM


 Watch the Live Stream of our current match against TechUnited. You may remember them from the Mid Size League from RoboCup, but they made the switch to the T1 by Booster Robotics just like we did.

We're at the RoboCup Asia-Pacific Beijing Masters!

We just finished our first game in Beijing and oh boy what a game that was!

Our little impromptu super team of HTWK Robots and Nao Devils made its Booster T1 debut against the other impromptu super team consisting of rUNSWift and the NuBots. The two Australian teams won their two previois matches, dominating every ball! They developed a dynamic strategy and played quite elegant maneuvers. But maybe even robots get tired after 2 games of 30 minutes; they did not seem to have much to put up against our brand-spanking new code and we ultimately won 14:0
(here, have a reeeeaaaallly bad picture of the current bracket results. sorry, but we were too busy to prepare something nicer 😬)

As I'm typing this, we are already playing our next game against TechUnited from Eindhoven. I'll post their live stream immediately! Stay Tuned!
Here they are, getting ready to play!