YuMDaP.net's blog

Unfortunately I did not have the time to post yesterday so I have to post my day-2 report today. Much has happened. We had very little time to do our last modifications before we had to compete in the first preliminary game.

A little backgroundinformation: The German teams of Berlin, Bremen, Darmstadt and Dortmund compete here as seperate teams. Usually the stand together as the German Team. They work at their universities, test their code in the German Opens and put it together to compete as one team on the Worldcup (which is in Japan this year). Since there are alot of people working on this (so called) German-Team-Code (and have been for a long time) most European teams use last years version of the GT-Code (2004). This code worked perfectly with the old robots and old rules. So the challenge was adjusting to the new rules (bigger field, no field-bonds), the new robots and of course (as in any competetion) the lightning conditions.

Now back where I was: The teams using the GT-code all behave fairly good. The teams not using it have massive problems with everything (self-localization, field, behavior). In my opinion that is because they don't have the resources the GT has and most definately don't have a behavioural-system as complex as the GTs (see the GT site for documentation if you like).

Yesterday our first match went pretty well. We had minimal problems with self-localization which made our robots seem a little clumsy. But the colour-tables appeared to be pretty good, behavior, too. The only problem was the other team. The Spanish Team Chaos did not get their robots to move at all during the first half of the game. Meaning we just had 4 obstacles on the field to bypass. The result was 4:1 and we scored all goals. Our second game against the Bremen Byters went really bad. Bad because they are a good team but had so many problems, they could have been an easy win. Too bad our colour-tables where messed-up so badly that we lost 1:4.

robots finding their field positions / switching colors during halftime

Though we lost - our goalie did at least some parts of his Job right. It's still fascinating to watch the robot jumping for the ball just like a human keeper.

our goalie stopping balls

Well, today went real bad for us. We had just one match against the Aibo Team Humboldt and lost 0:4. This gave us lots of time in the prep room to find the bugs and get the robots ready for this years challenges (accomplishing specific tasks) it was the quarter-final and we're now out of the loop. The bug - by the way - was that a part of the self-localization was missing / incorrectly implemented.

back to the prep room

Now I had some time to walk around and look at the other leagues games. Here are some pictures:

mid-sized / small / a strange robot

Right now I'm watching the first of the challenges. Scoring as many goals as possible under changing lightning conditions. I'll report on that when it's over and I have some pics.