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. 😀

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.