YuMDaP.net's blog

As promised here is the report on todays challenges: The field is surrounded by 4 bright spotlights. I should mention this is just the testing-field. Not the field used for the league games. But we do use it now for the challenges.

The first challenge was the following: One player on the field. The goal blocked by a goalie and another fieldplayer - both dead (just used as obstacles). The ball is placed on the center of the field. Now the challenge is to shoot as many goals as possible in 3 minutes with changing lightning condition. Practically that means that every 30 seconds the lightning changes (usually making all color tables useless). As we dropped out of the main competition already (in the quarter-finals) I'm happy to report that the Hamburg Dogbots won this competetion (with a little luck I admit).

the setup for challenge one

For the second challenge there were no teams willing to try it: A robot is given some time to check out the field and get it's position (by looking around and seeing the landmarks). Then all the landmarks will be removed leaving the robot alone with it's odometry. Now it has to follow a specific path. The robot who does this the best wins. Although there was no team competing the Microsoft Hellhounds (Dortmund, Germany) gave us a quite impressive demonstration of how their robot knows it's position on the field by memory and by looking at the field lines. We caught all that on tape and you can be sure we'll publish those videos.

Additionally I had a quick look at the rescue robots today. Hopefully I'll have more time tomorrow to examine those guys.

rescue robot finding victims and overcoming obstacles