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. 😀

A small step for the Robot, but a big step for the team

As usual business for us, we always check first the lighting conditions and the walking ability of our robots on the field.

For a very long time we are able to directly walk stable on the field without taking any additional changes, thanks to Thomas brilliant improvements during our preparation week before the Robocup.

Regarding lighting condition we have to face some small challenges, because for the robots it very dark on the field (~100 lux for those who are familiar with the topic).

But still we are basically able to play on first try 😎

First Preparation Day - Getting started

On a beautiful and chilly morning in Sydney we made our way to the venue. With an awesome motivation, sleepy eyes and high hopes we were looking forward to the event setup.

We like to share the view, which we had while having our breakfast 😊

Teamwork - All night long

It was a cold night (outside), but we as a team commited to one special mission! "Let us teach the robots, what a field border looks like!" 

You may ask why? We noticed our nine years old field border detection was showing signs of aging 😇

So we developed a new machine learning based detection yesterday night 😎

And to train this, we have to mark the field border in a lot of images 😒

So.. we practiced our team work and split up thousands of images to reach our goal.

All night long, but still with a happy face 😋

Spoiler Alert: Our robots are now able to detect the field border better then ever before 💓

Technical Committee members and Execs visiting the venue.

As part of the Robocup community we also take up responsibilities in different roles. So today Stefan as on of the elected technical committee member and Rico as an Exec visiting the venue to check the fields and the setup in general. Here are some impressions of the visit. All the fields and the rest of the installation will be finished tomorrow at the first setup day. Great to see everything is in place for the competition :-D

Feeling the grass and robot repairs

We visited the venue today to get a first look on the fields and get our robots repaired. One of our first checks is: which carpet was used as the artificial grass  and if we can walk on it. Here we see an expert to check the quality and properties.

Flo is checking the quality and properties of the grass.

Hello Australia! 🐨 Welcome to Sydney!

We did it! We survived 24h sitting in planes 😱 and finally arrived in Sydney. 😀 After a good night sleep to get rid of the jet lag we will be ready to start the day. 

  

Our longest Journey so far... Australia!

This is our longest journey so far. We are heading to Australia! :-D Our trip will take us from Frankfurt via a short stop over the United Arab Emirates to Sydney. This trip takes 24 hours and are round about 15900 km. Twenty teams have signed up for the RoboCup this year and everybody is already exited for the competition. So see you in Australia! We will keep you all in the loop. 

The traveling team this year: Caro, Rico, Stefan, Marvin and Flo.
Not shown here are Tobias and Thomas behind the camera.

Chip Shot

Thanks a lot for all the great feedback you all sent us regarding our cheerleading preview.

In addition to our cheerleading we are also working hard to improve our soccer gameplay. In the past we became known for our strong dribbling performance. In 2019 we want to bring new soccer moves to the table. Have a look at this chip shot we managed.

Of course, one of our Robots needs to play dead for this demonstration. But we can assure that nobot was harmed while working on our new shots.

Get Hyped for RoboCup 2019

Seven more days until RoboCup 2019 starts. This year the championship is held in Sydney, Australia.

Our Robotics Lab in Leipzig is bustling with activity of Robots and Humans. Working hard on gameplay improvements and lessons learned at RoboCup German Open 2019.

Of course, the team's spirits can't be allowed to drop when working long days in the summer heat. Thus, our Robots gave us a preview of their new cheerleading routine.

Stay tuned for more Robot footage in the coming days.

Opening of the new department "DIT" of the University of Applied Science (HTWK)

Coincident to the Hochschulsommerfest the opening of the new department DIT (Digitale Transformation) of the University of Applied Science (HTWK) was celebrated. Our team was invited to join them and present us two weeks before the RoboCup in Sydney.

Night of Science 2019 Finals

Enjoy watching our finals match against Bembelbots played during the Night of Science 2019 competition.

Night of Science 2019

At the moment we are visiting the Night of Science at Goethe Universität of Frankfurt am Main. Team Bembelbots invited us to this cosy Robot Event to play some exhibition matches and prepare for the RoboCup World Championship 2019.

At this two-day event we are present with six Robots and four Humans of Nao-Team HTWK.

We were happy to provide entertaining Robot Soccer matches for the visitors for a whole evening and night.

Special seating was provided for the young visitors, so they won’t miss one bit of the tense action in our games.

During exhibition games both Nao-Team HTWK (in blue) and Bembelbots (in Grey) elected to focus on their dribbling skills.

Team NomadZ from Zürich, Switzerland followed the Invitation as well. NomadZ distinguished themselves by having the best shooting skills of this Robot Event.

With their years of experience of attending Robot Soccer Events all teams participating were able to tune their motion skill to a very high level. We are happy to report that not a single robot was injured during exhibition matches.

At the conclusion of the first day teams Bembelbots and Nao-Team HTWK were able to reach the finals of our exhibition tournament. Accompanied by excited shouts of the visitors Nao-Team HTWK was able to win the finals match.