The Bremen “B-Human” robot soccer team is European champion once again. Following on its two previous triumphs as world and European champions in the Standard Platform League, the B-Human team stormed to victory in the RoboCup German Open 2011 in Magdeburg. With a devastating overall score of 267:8 the team remains unbeaten since it entered the league. B-Human is a cooperation project involving the research area “Safe Cognitive Systems” at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence [Deutschen Forschungszentrums für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI)] and the department of computer science at the University of Bremen.
Twelve teams from five different countries battled for the European championship title in the 32 matches held in Magdeburg. After conceding a goal at the beginning of the semi-final against the Nao Team HTWK from Leipzig, the Bremen team stormed on to qualify for the final match with a convincing 6:1 victory. This year B-Human faced the same challenger as in last year’s final, the team NimbRo from Bonn. Once again, with a combination of smooth play and occasional passes the Bremen team was clearly invincible, thrashing their opponent 6:1.
The RoboCup German Open is an annual event that has been held since 2001. Here, in the Standard Platform League, teams competed for the first time with four players per team, raising the demands placed on coordinating the players and making the matches more exciting. The RoboCup is an international initiative which was launched to promote research in the areas of artificial intelligence and robotics. The aim is by the year 2050 to develop a team of autonomous humanoid robots that will by then be capable of successfully competing against the reigning human world champions. In order to achieve this goal the different leagues concentrate on different research objectives. In the Standard Platform League the focus is on uniform hardware in the form of the humanoid robot called Nao developed by the French corporation Aldebaran Robotics. Hence, here the challenge for the teams in this league lies in software development – or to be more precise: in the development of robots’ artificial intelligence. After winning the world title, B-Human made its software freely accessible so that other teams can benefit.
For the team “manager”, Thomas Röfer, there can be no doubt about the next goal: “The next challenge for B-Human is the world championship which will be held in Istanbul in June 2011. Following the hat-trick in the German Open we want to go on to be world champions for the third time in succession.”
You can find more information at www.robocupgermanopen.de and www.b-human.de.
