Until now virtually unbeatable, the four-time-world-champion Bremen B-Human team had to concede defeat to the stronger Australian team in the RoboCup 2014 held in João Pessoa, Brazil. The Bremen team comprising kickers “trained” by members of a joint project involving the University of Bremen and the German Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) came third. They were beaten in the semi-finals by the rUNSWift team that subsequently went on to win the championship. However, B-Human did well in the special competitions, among other things receiving the “Most Valuable Player Award”.
B-Human scored commanding victories in the preliminary rounds and quarter finals, during which 25 goals were scored, and the Bremen goalkeeper did not let one single ball get through. However, the highly agile Australian competition put an end to their winning streak with a score of 0:5 in the semi-final. Later, though, Bremen was back in form, taking the third place by winning 7:0 against the UChile team – racking up the number of goals they scored during the championship to 37. Prof. Dr. Rolf Drechsler, leader of the DFKI research area Cyber-Physical Systems and professor for informatics at the University of Bremen, sees no reason to be discouraged: "It’s the game that counts”, he says: “You can’t win the championship every time. During the tournament, the team led by Thomas Röfer was able to gather valuable experience that will hopefully do them good next time round.” The B-Human team has already qualified for the 2015 World Championship to be held in China.
The lost semi-final match was only the second time in 85 RoboCup matches that B-Human was forced to concede defeat. Immediately after the game, team leader, Dr. Thomas Röfer, was quick to provide an explanation: "After having so strongly dominated the Standard Platform League over the past few years with its programmed moves, the B-Human code has been adopted by more than half of the competing teams. However, rUNSWift has gone on to develop its own moves. This year they had perfected this to an extent that enabled the Australian robots to out-maneuver everyone else." On top of this, says Röfer, the Australian kickers were better at covering the pitch. He congratulated the new world champions on their victory.
The Bremen B-Human team has been competing in the RoboCup Standard Platform League since 2009. In this category, where robots of the same design compete against each other, the focus is on developing intelligent software. Once the referee blows his whistle to start the game, the five kickers in each squad must act completely autonomously and without any outside interference. In addition to this, there are other competitions where researchers from all over the world are pitched against each other. Among these were the “selected team” tournament and the “Technical Challenges”. This year "B-Human" did well in both.
In the “selected team” tournament, which entails robots from different teams playing together, they won the title "Most Valuable Player". The great challenge here is that differently programmed kickers must first be able to exchange information per WLAN via a previously agreed protocol. In so doing, the robots must decide themselves which data are reliable and which are not. In the course of the six-match tournament the B-Human robots managed to do this best. This year the so-called "Technical Challenges" tournament involved being able to recognize when the referee whistles, starting to play on the marked out pitch without the software having to be set manually, and successfully taking part in open competition ("Open Challenge"). B-Human was able to win two out of the three categories, making them the overall winners.
For more information on this topic, please contact:
The official RoboCup 2014 homepage:http://www.robocup2014.org
Score board:http://www.tzi.de/spl/bin/view/Website/Results2014
The B-Human homepage team:http://www.b-human.de
B-Human on Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/pennybhuman
B-Human on Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/teambhuman
Your contact person at DFKI is:
Dr. Thomas Röfer
DFKI Bremen, Research Area Cyber-Physical Systems
Enrique-Schmidt-Str. 5 (Cartesium)
28359 Bremen
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)
Corporate Communication Bremen
Phone: +49 421 178 45 4180
email: uk-hbprotect me ?!dfkiprotect me ?!.de
Internet: www.dfki.de