Team B-Human is made up of eleven robots, nine University of Bremen students with their supervisor, Dr. Tim Laue, and Dr. Thomas Röfer, who works in the research area Cyber-Physical Systems at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). This has proven to be a tremendously successful combination. It is no less than the sixth time they have won the world championship title in all three categories of the Standard Platform League, this time held in Japan: The “Champions Cup” as well as the “Mixed Team Competition” and the “Technical Challenge”.

Strong goalkeeper

B-Human has won the world championship title six times, and they have been German and European champions a total of nine times. Despite having to face stronger than usual competition, they were unbeatable in the Champions Cup and went on to tie with TU Hamburg-Harburg in the “Mixed Team Competition”. Their opponents simply couldn’t get past the B-Human goalkeeper, which, or should we say “who”, excelled with a series of brilliant penalty-shot saves in the category “Technical Challenge”.

Playing on artificial turf a special challenge

Whereas in 2016 the teams only had to play on artificial turf in the “Outdoor Competition”, it was the first time the kickers had to cope with this extra challenge in all the championship matches. This presents an extra challenge for the two-legged robots. At the same time, though, it brings them closer to the reality of a real soccer situation.

All the players are NAO robots

B-Human is a regular participant in the various RoboCup Standard Platform League categories, which thank its name “Standard” to the fact that all the competing teams use the same robot model: the humanoid NAO robots produced by Softbank Robotics. The teams differ solely in the software they develop to “drive” their robot kickers, which have to react and move around completely autonomously during play. Team B-Human is sponsored by the Bremen firm CONTACT Software.