Thursday, April 7. 2005

Robocup GO2005 Day 1: Preps

We - the Hamburg Dogbots - are in Paderborn now. The journey here was pretty rough, yesterday, since we got stuck in a bad traffic jam. Now that we are here we're using the remaining 2 days (before the competitions commence) for preparations. Please read on for a detailed first day report and some pictures. I'm putting the images and the rest of the report on the 2nd page to avoid too much traffic (which I still get because of the GIMPshop for Windows article).

First thing we did, when we got to Paderborn was grabbing something to eat and go to bed immediately. Six hours in the car where definitely too much. We kept ourselves happy with beer, though. Anyway, we got up early this morning to get to the HNF (Heinz Nixdorf Forum) early. All Four-Legged-League teams got a big seminar room with a testfield, to do their preparations. The actual games are being held in a big theatre-like room so that more people can watch.

just posing to be good-humoured / first glance at the HNF

As you can see in the pictures the teams prep-room is pretty crowded. Also the ventilation system doesn't work and we're not allowed to open the doors for airing the room. Stupid fire prevention measures.

hot-box preproom / our stressed-out team

Traditionally the first thing to do on a competition is adjusting the colourtables to the lightning-conditions of the field. This years field is illuminated with 10 (very) bright spotlights. So bright that the robots see the green of the ground as white (like the white field-bounding lines). This poses the problem that the self-localization is heavily disturbed. So most of the time is spent on adjusting the self-localization algorithms. Not too much space for trying new strategies and robot-behaviors (the AI).

Peter and Janis fixing colourtables and self-localization / Nils moving Aibos

Diction and Benni writing a new segmentation algorithm

After all there was some time to look at the other leagues. The humanoids looks pretty promising already so I'm really looking forward to watch them play. Here are some first pictures. Details on the other leagues will follow in the upcoming days.