YuMDaP.net's blog

Phew... I don't even know where to start. First of all it was a very long trip. We started off in Hamburg at 8:30 am on July 10th. The train to Frankfurt took like 5 hours. From there we took a flight to Dubai which lasted just 7 hours. From there we catched our transfer flight to Osaka (12h!!!). Dubai, by the way, must be like the biggest shopping airport in the world. Someone told me you can even buy cars here.

Check-in and waiting in Frankfurt

Dubai duty-free and donut-break

Now the last time I was on a plane there were two on-board movies and some stupid radio program. On the second flight (to Osaka) every seat had a pretty big LCD-screen with a nice resolution and there was a selection of > 200 current movies plus TV programming. Every seat also had some kind of a gampad which you could use to play single- or multiplayer games against other people on the plane. So I could have left that book I bought for the flight at home .

robot transportation

was there a fire on the plane?

When we finally arrived in Osaka we were kindly received a representative of the Goethe-Institute Osaka who arranged for us to get to our accomodations. And this is where the culture-shock began already. The city of Osaka arranged for our quarters at hotel for truckers in the port of Osaka. This hotel never had guests exept long-distance truckers so having a group from Germany was a pretty new thing for them. The hospitality we experienced there was so overwhelming it was almost insane.

We met with two ladies working for the City of Oska PR (Public Relations). They just came along to do the translating because almost no one here speaks any English. When we arrived at the truckstop hotel we were asked to join a meeting with all personal involved in this hotel. The administrator, security, housekeeping... even the cook was there. After everyone was introduced to everyone they gave us a couple of maps. On these maps they (hand-)marked all regions of interest for us with different colors, annotated with German translations (they must have looked that up in a dictionary). Since no one there speaks any English they prepared notes with everything we could possibly want in German with Japanese translations to show the staff whenever we need something. Our rooms here are great, single-bed rooms with shower, toilet and air-conditioning and a nice harbour-view. And cheap as hell.

Finally some rest and relexation

Quick Update: Just got to the congress center, had breakfast and have internet now. The breakfast at our hotel was overwhelming. They waited us, which was completely uncustomary for this place. I was also told we are they first foreigners these people ever had contact to. Of course they tried to impress us by preparing a western breakfast. Not that we weren't happy about that but of course we would have loved some Japanese cuisine. The problem is: How could we tell them we want Japanese breakfast without insulting their efforts to prepare western breakfast for us. Well, crazy world this is..

Later
Matthias

Robocup 2005 is the world-championship in robot football. This might sound funny but is in fact a quite serious scientific event. RoboCup is an international initiative for the promotion of research in the areas “artificial intelligence” and “autonomous mobile robots”. Robot football serves as a standardized problem in which the results of different research disciplines can be directly compared.

The Hamburg Dogbots have qualified themselves to take part in the competitions, specifically in the so called Four-Legged-League. These are dog-like robots fabricated by Sony.

As a team member I will try to report daily (if I find the time) with information about what we do and of course lots of photos. As we will most definately hit the Oska nightlife you can be sure to get some footage on that, too. We might need some time to settle in, so I don't know when I will be able to start posting. Expect it to be sometime on July, 11th.

Until then,
Matthias

UPDATE: For German footage and reports please visit the new official team weblog at www.hamburg-dogbots.de.

Well, the German Open 2005 are over now. I just arrived back home in Hamburg and I am very tired. I hope you forgive me that I have no ambitions to write the day 4 report today. But it will be there soon, with alot of pictures. I was also told that all teams are going to get high-quality versions of the official footage of all games. Most of the teams made their own videos but most teams did not have professional TV cameras, so we are anxious to get those videos and you can be sure they will be published.

Until then
Matthias

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.

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).