Archive: News

We did it again! As we did in 2008 we released the source code and documentation of our (WorldCup winning) software. The Code Release can be downloaded here. Additional information such as the B-Human Team Report and the Code Release Documentation is available here.

B-Human is the RoboCup SPL World Champion 2009! In an exciting Final match we defeated Northern Bites with 5:0.
A detailed report of the match can be found in the Northern Bites Blog. Thanks and congratulations to the Northern Bites for the great match! Some photos and videos of the final will follow soon ...

During the whole competition we achieved a goal ratio of 64:1. In addition to the soccer tournament we could also win the Technical Challenges (shared first place with Nao-Team HTWK from Leipzig).

We won the Semi-Final against Austin Villa with 7:0. The opponent in the final will be Northern Bites who have defeated Nao Devils Dortmund in a nail-biting match with 4:3 after penalty kick.

In the Quarter-Final match against CMWrightEagle we achieved the highest win in this year's competition so far (11:1). CMWrightEagle had a very defensive strategy and often tried to prevent us from scoring goals by setting their robots into the keeper position. We received our first goal against in this tournament when we shot against a defensive robot of CMWrightEagle, which shot the ball back over the whole field into our goal.
In the Semi-Final tomorrow we will face the winner of Austrian Kangaroos vs. Austin Villa.

It is not overstated to say that this was one of the most exciting soccer matches ever played in the SPL Nao League, although the result might not indicate this. The robots of team BURST disturbed us a lot next to the ball and there were very interesting fights about the ball. In addition they had a strong goal keeper who made some great saves. The audience also seemed to have enjoyed the game, they applauded and laughed a lot.
Thanks to team BURST for this great match! We are looking for some more thrilling matches in the finals.

Our second match of Round Robin 2 against Team Chaos ended with a 9:0 for us. Currently we are placed first in our group with a goal ratio of 18:0 and are qualified early for the Quarter Finals. The next match will be against BURST at 14:25.

We won the first match of the second Round Robin with 9:0 against Austin Villa, the winner of the RoboCup US Open 2009!
The match was characterised by keeper-problems in both teams. In the first half we had some problems with the localisation of our goal keeper. On the other side, the goal keeper of Austin Villa kicked the ball into the own goal twice.
A series of penalty shoot-outs this evening will decide about our other opponents in the second Round Robin tomorrow.

B-Human also won the second match against TJArk from China with 9:0. In the second Round Robin we will face Austin Villa, the winner of the match Burst vs. Eagle Knights and the winner of Team Chaos vs. Robo Eireann. The game against Austin Villa will take place at 16:15.

We won our first match in this year's RoboCup against Kouretes with 7:0. Since the game between the third team in our group, TJArk and Kouretes ended drawn, we are currently placed first in our group. For a complete list of all results visit the RoboCup 2009 website.

After a 12 hours train ride we arrived in Graz on Sunday and already completed the team registration. The first two days will be used for team setup and testgames, the soccer tournament will begin on Wednesday.

A schedule of the tournament can be found on the RoboCup 2009 website. In the first Round Robin we will play against Kouretes from Greece on July 1, 10:55 and against TJArk from China on July 2, 9:25.

The RoboCup 2009 in Graz will open on June 29th. Our preparation for this event is in full progress. We are looking forward to an exciting tournament and interesting games. See you in Graz!

Some links to press articles regarding the German Open 2009:

• http://www.konstruktionspraxis.vogel.de/themen/automatisierung/steuerungen/articles/185627/
• http://www.silicon.de/cio/strategie/0,39038989,41003441,00/die+gewinner+des+8_+robocup+german+open+2009.htm
• http://www.pr-inside.com/de/print1212539.htm
• http://www.wochenspiegel-saarland.de/index.php?id=242&doc=106404
• http://www.elektronikpraxis.vogel.de/sps-ipc/articles/185583
• http://www.blogspan.net/presse/bremer-informatik-studenten-werden-europameister-bei-den-robocup-german-open-2009/mitteilung/64873/
• http://www.heise.de/newsticker/RoboCup-German-Open-Die-Sieger-stehen-fest--/meldung/136765
• http://www.l-iz.de/Bildung/Leipzig%20bildet/2009/04/Spannung-beim-Roboterfußball-in-Hannover-HTWK-Leipzig-Team.html
• More...

B-Human won the final match against Nao-Team HTWK with 9:0. Thanks and congratulations to Nao-Team HTWK for a great match!
With 27 goals shot and no goals received B-Human finished the competition as the winner.

• Videos of the final match can be found on our YouTube Channel
• For photos of the GermanOpen 2009 please visit our Photo Gallery
• Complete Results: http://www.tzi.de/spl/bin/view/Website/GermanOpenResults2009

The links to the daily heise article about the RoboCup; B-Human is named in all of them.

• http://www.heise.de/newsticker/RoboCup-German-Open-Es-kommt-Bewegung-in-die-Halle--/meldung/136695
  
• http://www.heise.de/newsticker/RoboCup-German-Open-Rettungsroboter-ueben-fuer-den-Ernstfall--/meldung/136595
  
• http://www.heise.de/newsticker/RoboCup-German-Open-Die-Konkurrenz-schlaeft-nicht--/meldung/136518
  
• http://www.heise.de/ct/RoboCup-German-Open-Turnieratmosphaere-in-Halle-22--/news/meldung/136448

B-Human won the Semi Finals match against Nao Devils Dortmund with 4:0. Our opponent in the final tomorrow will be Nao-Team HTWK from Leipzig. The match will be hold at 11:30.

The 3rd Place match will be TeamChaos-UMU vs. Nao Devils Dortmund (10:00).

Today, we had our last round robin game, against TeamChaos-UMU at 1:30 pm. We won the game with 2:0. At 5:30 pm, we will play the semi final against the "Nao Devils Dortmund".

German Open Schedule and Results 2009:
http://www.tzi.de/spl/bin/view/Website/GermanOpenResults2009

Today, we had our second round robin game, against ZaDeAt at 2:00 pm. In the first half, we scored one goal with a straight forward shot but some other shots missed the goal closely. We had some trouble to identify the right colors due to changing lighting conditions on the field caused by unstable weather conditions. After a recalibration during halftime, the robots performed better and scored two more goals. The final result was 3:0.

German Open Schedule and Results 2009:
http://www.tzi.de/spl/bin/view/Website/GermanOpenResults2009

Today, the competition started. Our first game was against the team Kouretes with the great result of 9:0.

While the team setup is in full progress, we just received the schedule for the competion: There will be two groups. One with five teams and one with four teams. The first games will be played on Tuesday and go on until Friday. Sunday and Monday we are using for setup, training and test games. Our competition games will be on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and hopefully Friday too. The complete schedule is available here: http://www.tzi.de/spl/bin/view/Website/GermanOpenResults2009

We put two small videos with the Nao playing soccer to the video section.

B-Human is proud to be accepted for the Nao competition on RoboCup 2009. The worldcup will take place in Graz (Austria) from June 29 to July 5 2009.

B-Human decided to release the 2008 source code. We think that releasing code is an important part of sharing scientific outcomes within the RoboCup community. The code is fully executable on the Aldebaran Nao, but it is configured for the humanoid field settings of 2008. The Code Release can be downloaded here. A comprehensive documentation of the Code Release including the B-Human Team Report of 2008 is available here.

In 2009 B-Human is going to participate in the Standard Platform League with the Aldebaran Nao. You can get an impression about our current work progress on the videos page. More information about the Nao are available here.

We reached the 5th place in the technical challenge competition, which consists of an obstacle, dribbling and passing challenge.

We are thrown out of the competition in the second group stage after defeats against FUmanoids, Tsinghua Hephaestus and CIT Brains. All in all B-Human was able to score four goals in the whole tournament. In terms of our mean hardware equipment we are nevertheless reasonably satisfied with our achievement. An important conclusion of the RoboCup 2008 for us is that being successful with such a hardware equipment like we have gets much more difficult every year.
The winner of the Humanoid League KidSize tournament once again is Team NimbRo (7:6 victory against Team Osaka). Congratulations!

We reached the first place in our group with a 0:0 draw against ZJUDancers and a 3:0 win against Bogobots. In the 2nd round robin we have to play against FUmanoids, Tsinghua Hephaestus and the winner of CIT Brains/JEAP. Only the first- and second-placed teams in this group will reach the quarterfinals.

We arrived to Suzhou yesterday - the venue of the RoboCup 2008. Fortunately our luggage (mostly) endured the flight and we did not have any problems entering China. The first two days have been used for unpacking all the things and doing some work on the most important fields. We already completed the check in procedure for the event and used the possibility of taking a short view onto the soccer fields and the team area. Tomorrow we are going to start with the team setup.

Sven Hinz (Team B-Smart) recorded some of our GermanOpen matches:

• Quarterfinal match against UChile
• Technical Challenges
• Test match

We lost the Third Place Game against Darmstadt Dribblers with 0:2. In the first half we were able to keep the 0:0, but as in the matches before we had problems with the walking balance of our robots.

As expected we lost the semifinal match against NimbRo with 0:10. The next game will be the Third Place Game against Darmstadt Dribblers.

We won our quarterfinal match agains UChile with 3:0 and have to fight against NimbRo in the semifinal today. In the Technical Challenges we reached the third place after a successful completion of the obstacle challenge in 35 seconds.

We are placed third in group A after the round robin. The first game against FUmanoids got lost very unlucky with 0:1 after a last minute goal. In the second game we lost 0:10 agains NimbRo. In the quarterfinal we will fight against UChile tomorrow.

While the team setup is in full progress, we just received the schedule for the competion: There will be two groups with three teams each. The first games will be played on Wednesday and the Technical Challenges will be hold on Thursday. Monday and Tuesday will be used for setup, training and test games.

From April 21 - 25 April the RoboCup German Open will take place during HANNOVER MESSE. B-Human will participate in this event and possibly show their new robot prototype. We will hopefully be able to submit a summary of every day on this website.

B-Human is one of the 24 qualified teams for the RoboCup 2008 Humanoid Kid Size League competition in Suzhou!

We recently submitted the qualification material for RoboCup 2008 in Suzhou. This years team description paper and qualification video can be found on this page.

The B-Human team just got home from its project weekend 2008. During the last weekend we worked on several tasks affecting hardware and software: Creating a keeper behaviour, setting up the obstacle challenge infrastructure, optimizing the walk of the robot, testing the new prototype, implementing a new ServoControl tool, restructuring the vision code, fixing several other hard and software issues.

The new PC104-Board for our new robot prototype arrived a few days ago. We hope to be able to replace the PDA and the Windows Mobile operating system by this new board running on Linux. If the tests of the new board are successful, the construction of a new robot body will be required. It will take place in the next months.
Because the RoboCup competitions in 2008 will be 3vs3 tournaments we need to construct a fourth robot. In the last weeks we constructed another prototype for this fourth robot with some improvements to the older model.

The following video gives some impressions of the work, the activities and the latest achievements of B-Human.
If you are interested in the work we are doing: Why not support us?

In October 2007 the B-Human team got strengthened by 18 students from the Department of Computer Science of the University of Bremen. The students will work in the team for two years on the basis of their advanced study project.

The PC104-Board for our new prototype will arrive in a few days, so that we can start to plan a new body. We want to replace the old PDA with a new solution including the PC104-Board and some kind of WebCam. Special thanks to our sponsor RS, who makes this possible.

After we had a goal ratio of 8:1 in the preliminaries and became second in our group, we lost the quarterfinals against team RO-PE. Including that game we had a goal ratio of 8:3.

We've lost the quarterfinal match vs. team RO-PE with 0:2. Apparently there were some problems with our self-localization and team RO-PE has (just like a lot of other teams) a faster robot and can do harder kicks. This means the end of RoboCup 2007 for us, we will have some time to watch the finals tomorrow.

We attended the technical challenge today and were quite confident that we could at least complete the obstacle challenge. If we would have concentrated more on this challenge and not on the regular matches we might have succeeded. But luck was not on our side and the games were more important to us. We are now preparing for the quarterfinal match tomorrow morning ...

B-Human played the last two preliminary matches today and both ended in a draw. We had good chances in both matches but unfortunately didn't use them. We are now qualified for the quarterfinals with the 2nd place in our group. Since we will meet a strong team in the next round it will be tough on Saturday. Tomorrow will be the technical challenge day and we will try to attend all the challenges although it won't be easy with our robots and the little remaining time.

B-Human played two more matches today and won both of them! The first match vs. JEAP from Japan ended with a 3:0 in our favour, the second one vs. Sprint from the US with 2:0 in our favour. The robots are still doing fine, although we had to change the first motor today. While the RoboCup progresses many little improvements are made to behaviour, recognition or other parts of our software system. We have also begun to prepare for the upcoming technical challenges.

B-Human played its first game at the Robot Soccer World Championship in Atlanta today and won with 2:0 vs. Tsinghua Hephaestus from China. The robots were running fine and even though the behaviour was almost entirely tested in the simulator our little guys did quite well. We noticed that our robots now really have problems performing a standard kick on one leg, so Judy built us a new "Grandma & Grandpa (TM)(R) 1998" style kick which stabilizes the robot with one arm on the floor. It pretty much looks like a breakdance or a foot sweep ;) It was even mentioned on Heise.

B-Human finished 4th (of 8 teams) at the German Open RoboCup in Hannover. More details coming soon ...

We are one of the 24 teams that qualified for the Robot Soccer World Championship in Atlanta, USA in the beginning of July.

Our team description paper and qualification videos for RoboCup 2007 in Atlanta can be found right here.

New team, new site. Our new homepage is still under construction. The subsection will be completed soon and some better images will follow soon. We will also setup a new gallery for our pictures in the next days.