Jogi's squad showed them how to do it: Now it's the turn of the Bremen robot soccer squad "B-Human" to make their mark in Brazil. Just one week after the final of the Fifa football world championship games, next Monday, 21 July 2014, the RoboCup robot soccer team championship will begin in João Pessoa, Brazil. The B-Human ‘team’ sets off for the North East of Brazil on Thursday 17 July 2004, where it will defend its title. B-Human is a cooperation project between the University of Bremen and the research department of Cyber-Physical Systems, a division of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI).
Bremen to defend its world champion title
On 21 July around 4,000 scientists and engineers from all over the world will converge on the “Poeta Ronaldo Cunha Lima” convention center to compete in various competitions for the coveted RoboCup title. The event has become a major factor in advancing robotic development. The Bremen group has long been a permanent guest, having taken part in the annual RoboCup event ever since 1997. They have won the RoboCup four times already and are reigning world champions. Moreover, they won the German Open in the Standard Platform League, where they have to compete with robots of the same design. Here, the focus lies on advancing the software used in the increasingly autonomous interacting robots.
“We are up against some strong competition”
Dr. Thomas Röfer, a DFKI researcher and leader of the nine-member “team behind the team”, can only be sure of one thing: Among the 25 competing teams “We are up against some strong competition”, he says: Especially from Australia and USA – to say nothing about the other German teams. Last year Bremen won the final match against the Leipzig Nao team HTWK, beating them once again in the final of the German Open in April.
Five robots per team
The competition is expanded by new challenges every year: After the size of the “pitch” was doubled last year to 9x6 meters and the number of robots per team increased from four to five, this time the main challenge has been to adapt the software to take these changes into account. Moreover, this year will be the first time there is a competition involving robots selected from different squads. The difficulty here is that although they are all are controlled by different software the robots have to play as a team. This means that not only the match results and number of goals scored will be decisive, but also the quality of the robots’ team-play. The Bremen team was able to gain initial experience of these new rules in the German Open, where they took the Best Player Award: Just how they get on against the international competition in Brazil remains to be seen.
New team
For some members of the Bremen team it will be their first world championship. “B-Human” is a student project involving members of the University’s Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics in cooperation with the DFKI research area Cyber Physical Systems led by Professor Rolf Drechsler. It has become commonplace for students to submit Bachelor and Master theses supervised by professors of the University of Bremen and the Collaborative Research Center “Spatial Cognition”, and leading researchers of the DFKI. The team currently comprises eleven men and five women, of whom a total of nine persons will fly to Brazil for the world championship.
B-Human: http://www.b-human.de
Robo Cup: http://www.robocup2014.org
B-Human on Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/pennybhuman
B-Human on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/204965249522727
Weitere Informationen:
University of Bremen/
Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH (DFKI)
Tim Laue (member of the B-Human team)
phone: +49 421-218-64209
email: tlaueprotect me ?!uni-bremenprotect me ?!.de
DFKI-team Corporate Communication
Astrid Labbert
Phone: +9 421-17845 6626
email: uk-hbprotect me ?!dfkiprotect me ?!.de
