The Bremen “B-Human” team is soccer world champion once again. “We are overjoyed that Bremen has regained the title”, says team leader Dr. Thomas Röfer following their championship victory in the 17th “RoboCup” world championship that took place in the Dutch town of Eindhoven. Although they put up a great struggle, last year the team had to concede victory in the final play off. They had better luck this time, winning by a decisive 6:2 in the German-German final match of the Standard Platform League against another German team, Nao HTWK from Leipzig. This is the fourth time that “B-Human” – a joint project involving the University of Bremen and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) – has topped the championship league in a contest that is becoming more and more demanding every year.
For this year the international contest in the Standard Platform League, in which “B-Human” customarily plays, included a number of additional challenges. For instance, the size of the “pitch” was increased to 9 x 6 meters, effectively doubling the field of action. In addition to this, the number of players per team was increased by five. This meant that the researcher team of “trainers” had to adapt the software behind their robotic players to cope with the new requirements. The robots have to cover longer distances; and the addition of another five team members raises the complexity of the team play quite considerably.
However, this didn’t present an obstacle to “B-Human”. With 8:0 the Bremen team scored a sovereign triumph against UT Austin Villa from Texas (USA) in the semi-finals. This sweet revenge – last year they lost against the Texans in the final match – spurred the team on to ultimate victory. The finals constituted a rematch of the final of the German Open, the Bremen team already having won against Leipzig in Magdeburg earlier this year. By the end of the first half of the world championship match there was still no clear favorite, with Bremen leading 2:1. They then went on to easily pull ahead during the second half.
The “B-Human” team’s 6:2 victory is an impressive addition to their collection of titles. The Bremen team is now current German Champion and World Champion. Beside the actual contest, “B-Human” impressed the experts in all three of the sub-categories, called Technical Challenges. These entail research advances in respect of passing between three robots, and the interplay with robots of the opposing team. For the very first time, Bremen was able to demonstrate a corner kick, something that until now had not been achieved in the Standard Platform League. “The game gets more complicated every year”, says DFKI researcher Röfer. “Bit by bit we are gradually approaching the ultimate goal of reproducing the skills of human soccer players.”
“B-Human” plays regularly in the RoboCup, an international initiative to promote research in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. The shared research objective is by the year 2050 to develop a team of autonomous humanoid robots capable of defeating the human World Champion team at that time. In pursuit of this goal, robotic teams are organized in different leagues, each with their own specifically defined and progressively enhanced research objectives. For example, the focus of the Standard Platform League is on software development. The participating teams deploy identical two-legged robots, manufactured by Aldebaran Robotics. This means they are competing exclusively on the basis of the software employed. “B-Human” publishes details of their software following each world championship match so that other teams can also benefit from their success.
B-Human is a student project run in cooperation between the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Bremen and the research group entitled “Cyber-Physical Systems” belonging to the Deutschen Forschungszentrums für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH (DFKI). The research group is led by Prof. Dr. Rolf Drechsler. The 17-member “B-Human” team comprises students in higher semesters and involves DFKI researchers.
Official website of RoboCup: http://www.robocup.org
Website of the B-Human team: http://www.b-human.de
B-Human on Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/pennybhuman
B-Human on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/204965249522727
If you would like to obtain more information, please contact:
Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH (DFKI)
Unternehmenskommunikation Bremen
Phone: +49 421-178 45 41 80
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www.dfki.de
