Sorry for the long delay, but we all had to catch up some sleep. Curiously, we missed the night from Thursday to Friday. On Saturday then we entered the fair at noon and started to clean up our team area and to pack our bags. So I’ll try to reflect the last two days now. Below you can see a photo of our team at the German Open 2007 in Hannover.

The Carpe Noctem 2007 Team Members (top-down, left-right):
Kurt Geihs, Till Amma, Christof Hoppe, Christian Manz (Workshop), Detlef Brill (Workshop), Philipp Baer, Kai Baumgart, Florian Seute, Daniel Saur.
Stefan Triller, Roland Reichle, Michael Blumenstein, Ingo Schulz (Workshop), Jens Wollenhaupt, Thomas Neumann (Workshop), Wolfgang Lengemann (Workshop).

The second round-robin matches were scheduled for Friday morning. We competed against Tech United at 12:00 and CoPS Stuttgart at 14:00.

Tech United edged us out with only one goal they shot at the beginning of the second half. We again suffered from hardware problems when many of our USB-to-Serial adapters gave up. It disabled our shooting device and sometimes even the motion. The robots from Tech United took the chance and scored the goal from the centerline which kicked us out of the tournament. They had a very effective and precise defence; our robots simply were unable to get through. Their team consists of six robots, the hardware of which has proved to be very stable. It was a very good and interesting match, thanks!

CoPS Stuttgart was our last opponent we had to play against on Friday. We all were very anxious to this match since it was our last chance to enter the half finals. We were aware that CoPS are in fact a very strong team but it is allowed to be lost in reverie, no? :) Well, in the end we lost the match. CoPS played a very good match in the first half. Fortunately (for us) they had some problems in the second half which we used to score one goal. Again, this match was nice to watch as both teams were very active and agile. Thanks, CoPS!

Now let me summarize the German Open 2007 in Hannover. It was a very impressive event. Much bigger that the German Open at the HNF in Paderborn. The location is really great as it allows the teams to promote themselves and to get in contact with the industry. The only thing that we all missed was a real social event. The organizers should definitely think about arranging one for the next German Open. It’s a come-together that’s very important for the whole community — not to mention food and beverage for free :)

We played a very impressive and good match. We were one of the few teams that had neither problems with the increased field size (thanks to our great self-localization by Roland) nor network communication. Merely the lightning conditions were difficult for us. In an article posted on the heise ticker, the author reflects the viewpoint of Mostly Harmless which had problems with the daylight shining in though the entrance doors. For us, the color temperature was the bigger problem: all the colors appeared warmer due to the slightly orange lightning in the hall. Additionally, the blue goal was way too dark.

Apart from all these problems and the lost matches, we are all very, very happy with this result. We only had one week for preparation and attended with almost the same code-base we used in Bremen 2006. The all-new dribbling behavior by Jens and Daniel was a real stroke of luck. In my opinion we wouldn’t have scored as much goals without it. As mentioned in an earlier post already, the new auto-calibration by Christof really made the game setup easier. Till and Michael took care of compressed air, administrative tasks, and the live cam with its enormous popularity. Kai and Florian were the masters of the hardware and “Mops”, our goalie. Stefan did a very good job in maintaining our networking infrastructure and monitoring the robots during matches. I’m personally very pleased that the integration of my new communication framework based the Spica-approach met all our expectations. It has done a very good job as well!

Finally, we all would like to thank the Precision Engineering Workshop of Kassel University headed by Ingo Schulz! The robot hardware they designed and built for and with us is just great. The new wheels we introduced this year were designed and built by them as well. Besides providing perfect movement, they were the most prominent eye-catcher.

Now some closing words on the code release. As we promised we will release our code as open source again this year. Nevertheless, we will wait until the RoboCup World Championships 2007 in Atlanta are over. So stay tuned. If you have questions about or are interested in some details or our robots or the software, do not hesitate to contact us!