YuMDaP.net's blog

We just finished and lost our first Round-Robin2 match and lost against the Dutch Aibo team. We clearly dominated the first half of the game and it seemed our code was better. The goalie, though, had problems with locating it's position and left the field twice. This gave the Dutch two possibilities to score and they used them. At least we scored one goal so that we didn't lose to zero.

Losing this match now means that tommorrow we'll have to beat German Team to make it into the quarter finals.

Lots of work ahead
Matthias

Day two was a complete success for the Hamburg Dogbots. We won all matches in our group and finished as group first. This doesn't make the next Round-Robin matches easy as we have to play against the German Team. There is not much chance we can win this except with alot of luck. The first match today will be against the Dutch Aibo Team. We are about equally strong I think.

we are group first after round-robin 1

So it is three matches, one today and tomorrow we're going to play two more matches. Two of these we have to win to enter the quarter finals. That means if we don't win todays match against Dutch Aibo we are pretty much out of the competition.

In the mean time we had to time to check out the area around the Intex Osaka Congress Center. It is so strange that nobody here speaks any language but Japanese at all. Even in the big malls the only speak Japanese. Funny about this is that in Japan, too, everything is being "americanized". English signs everywhere, like Summer Sale. But even there no single person I tried to talk to speaks English, Not in the stores, not at food joints, not even at Starbucks, McDonalds or Subway. Nonetheless the people here are the most friendly and helpful folks you could ever imagine.

Got to go now, I will keep you posted on our first match in the second Round-Robin,
Matthias

UPDATE: I just saw the Round-Robin-2 match German Team vs Wright Eagles. This was very interesting for us since both teams have the German Team programming code as their basis (same as us). I might have to explain thit further. The German Team has superior code and since it is Open Source other teams can use it, too. But there have to be significant modifications if they want to use the code in competitions. Here, at Robocup 2005 I think 8 teams are using the GT code of last years Robocup. The game I just saw was a draw and it must have been pretty embarrassing for the GT to be beaten by a derivate of their own code.

Basic rules

Let me explain the basic rules of the game before I get to the reports:
the setup: Every half takes 10mins with a 5min break. Every team has the right to take one 5min time-out. The blue team has the kick-off and plays on the yellow goal while the red team plays on the blue goal. During the half-time the teams switch colors and sides.
during game:for longer than 3secs it is not allowed to push field player, push the goalie, hold the ball. If a team kicks the ball off the field the ball will be placed inside the field for the other teams advantage.

GT vs. Araibo

German Team vs. Araibo:
I just watched the first game of the German Team against the Japanese Araibo team. The German Team hardly pulled through to a 1:0 win, although their code is thought to be superior to the code of most other teams. Thomas Röfer, University Bremen, comments «Worst game ever!».

after the first goal by GT

2nd half

I'm not sure if the GT still used this game for testing and did not play with their real code. Maybe to deceive opponents. At least sometimes one gets that impression. Both teams self-localization (of the robots) looked pretty decent. Araibo had some nice shots I hadn't seen before. The GTs robots also seemed to move faster than last time I saw them play. Both teams didn't appear to have any team-play implemented.

It is a really nice day in Osaka and all of us are looking forward to the first matches. At this moment the last tests are being taken and the teams are clearing the fields for the first group games to begin.

how every day should start

After the first round I will post some pictures and analyses, so stay tuned.
Matthias

We just completed the first test-match. It was pretty much of a desaster. But nothing really serious. Let me explain: To see the robots need color-tables so that they know which color is which. The ball for example is orange. But orange looks differently with different lightning conditions. So we have to tell the robot exactly what he is supposed to recognize as orange.

When we did that we were a bit hasty so that our robots saw red as orange. The bad thing is our robots are red. This ended up in our robots chasing each other, so it looked kind of embarassing. But as I said this is not too serious since color tables can be adjusted. The behaviour of the robots was (other than them chasing each other) as expected. We are looking forward to the next test match.

A few word on Osaka. They have the rainy season here right now which means if it's not raining the humidity of 90% kills you. Plus it's super-hot. The air-conditioning in the Osaka INTEX on the other hand must be set to 10 degrees or something. At least I'm freezing like hell.

I'll write more details later tonight,
Matthias

BTW: Osaka is GMT+9