The Bremen B-Human robot soccer team, four times world champion and current holder of the title, recently once again successfully defended the RoboCup German Open B-Human, going to the top of the Standard Platform League in nine matches against teams from four different countries. Two further prizes connected with the internationally oriented German championship held in Magdeburg crowned the unbroken success of the team from the University of Bremen and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI): the “HARTING Open Source Prize” and the “Best Player Award”. “We are naturally immensely proud of our performance and are now looking forward to the world championship in July”, says the team’s leader and DFKI researcher Dr. Thomas Röfer.
As in 2013, in this year’s final, B-Human once again had to play against the Nao-Team HTWK from Leipzig. The play was intense throughout the entire match, both teams showing their offensive and defensive strengths. By half time B-Human had built up a comfortable lead of 3 to nil, and in the end they won by 4 to 1.
Two further awards for Bremen
Beside the title, this year B-Human also brought the newly instated “Best Player Award” to Bremen. In the so-called “Selected Team Competition”, mixed teams comprising robots from different teams play against each other. Although all the robots involved are equipped with different software, they must still be able to cooperate with their rival teammates. This competition is not only about the final score, but also the “team spirit” the robots are capable of.
And on top of this the Bremen B-Human team won the “HARTING Open Source Prize”. This annual prize awarded by the HARTING technology group goes to the team that makes the greatest contribution towards advancing the RoboCup by publishing software or blueprints for hardware. Making the software freely available after the championship is an integral part the competition. The programming that went into the Bremen B-Human team was so convincing that half of all the other teams competing in this year’s German Open use it. Moreover, the Bremen researchers have developed a referee application which supplies the participants with statistics on their game.
These statistics show that B-Human shoots a goal every two minutes of playing time and – just as important – on average only two players per match are punished with a time penalty. Both statistics put B-Human far ahead of their opponents. In July B-Human will travel to Brazil to defend its world champion title.
About B-Human
“B-Human” is a regular player in the RoboCup, which is an international initiative for the promotion of research in the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics. The common goal pursued by the participants is to develop by 2050 a team of autonomous humanoid robots that will be able to defeat the reigning human champion soccer team at that time. The participating teams all use the same identical two-legged robots (produced by Aldebaran Robotics), and therefore are only able to beat their competitors by means of the software they employ.
B-Human is a student project embedded in the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Bremen and the research area “Cyber-Physical Systems” of the Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH (DFKI). The research area is led by Prof. Rolf Drechsler. Behind the “B-Human” soccer robots is a group of 17 advanced students led by researchers from the DFKI and the University of Bremen.
For further information please visit:
The official homepage of the RoboCup German Open 2014: http://www.robocupgermanopen.de
Score table:http://www.tzi.de/spl/bin/view/Website/GermanOpenResults2014
Website Team B-Human:http://www.b-human.de
B-Human at Twitter:https://twitter.com/#!/pennybhuman
B-Human at Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/teambhuman
DFKI contact person:
Dr. Thomas Röfer
Research Area Cyber-Physical Systems
Phone: +49 421 218 64200
email: Thomas.Roeferprotect me ?!dfkiprotect me ?!.de
email: Team B-Human: grp-bhumanprotect me ?!informatik.uni-bremenprotect me ?!.de
Internet: www.dfki.de/cps
Press Information DFKI Bremen:
Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH (DFKI)
Communication Team Bremen
Daniela Menzel
Phone +49 421 178 45 4180
email: uk-hbprotect me ?!dfkiprotect me ?!.de
Internet: www.dfki.de
