The RoboCup German Open 2008 are over but some teams are looking forward to the RoboCup World Championships in Suzhou, China in about two months. We will not take part as we do not have the funding and nobody has any free time left. We concentrated on the German Open with more or less success. Here comes a short résumé of the last months.

By the end of last year we started the development of an electro-magnetic kicking device (E-Kicker). It took way too much time and personal resources so all the other activities were almost missed out. We further built two new robots — Mücke and Scotti — which also required an enormous amount of work to be finished. They not only have new motors but also new motor controllers, the software of which had serious weaknesses and bugs.

This is why most of our team members were forced to deal with the hardware even one day before we left Kassel, headed towards Hannover. Software, behaviours, and strategies were tested only with at most two robots, because of no suitable space for testing. Time was also a very important factor, of course.

The day of arrival in Hannover, Saturday 19th of April, was thus dedicated to a quick setup and testing, testing, testing. One of the testings then revealed severe weaknesses in communication and collaboration, thanks to the new version of Spica which was introduced only about one week earlier. Spica is a communication toolkit which allows to model a communication infrastructure at an abstract level. A concrete implementation is then generated for the requested target platforms. The German Open were meant to be the first real test for the new version. All the other testing and tuning went quite well.

On Monday, 21th of April, test games were scheduled. No team except the Brainstormers Tribots wanted to attend a match, so only team setup was performed at the playground. Some members of our team did not stop coding until the daybreak.

On Tuesday, 22th of April, the first round robin games started. Our first and only match this day started at about 8pm with two hours delay against CoPS Stuttgart. In the first half we scored two goals. Thanks to six quite neutralised robots in our team, CoPS shot four goals in the second half. We thus lost the match 2:4. This night we burned the first midnight oil — with success: things seemed to work much better.

On Wednesday, 23th of April, we attended two more matches, one against Paderkicker, the other against ISePorto. We won both games and thus moved to the next round being the second of our group. We scored nine goals in the first round robin and captured four.

On Thursday, 24th of April, the second round robin started. We had to compete against Brainstormer Tribots and Mostly Harmless/Ulm Sparrows/FH-Ravensburg-Weingarten (MH/US/FHRW), a double mixed team in our group. After loosing the match against Tribots, we edged MH/US/FHRW out. With this result we entered the semi finals.

Until this point, our robots were just creeping around on the playground, not even showing rudimentary skills. Nobody had an idea so we just tuned some parameters hoping for a better performance.

On Friday, 25th of April, the semi finals and finals were scheduled. In the morning we had to run against CoPS Stuttgart. It was an amazing match, our robots really performed great! We shot the first goal and maintained the winning margin until three minutes before the end of game. Then CoPS threw the ball onto our goal line. It was no goal. Almost no robot moved except one of our robots who decided to get rid of the ball on the goal line. He then unfortunately scored an own goal. This lead to extra time and a golden goal for CoPS. We lost the match 1:2 and thus missed the finals. We nevertheless were happy that our robots showed a great performance on the same level with CoPS. Great game, unfortunate outcome.

Tribots lost their match against Tech United so we were forces to play against them once more, this time in the petite finale. Our robots had some minor difficulties again. Further more, our goalie was accidentally switched off after repositioning and thus unable to prevent about three goals. The match, however, was great, even though we did not score a single goal. Tribots scored seven goals and won the third place.

It was a great event for which we had much too little lead time. We achieved a result that almost nobody of our team anticipated before. We even could have performed better if the numerous small bugs and weaknesses had been fixed a priori. This job is left for next year: German Open 2009 and the RoboCup World Championships in Graz 2009.

Last but not least I want to thank all team members that contributed to this great achievement before, during, and after the German Open 2008. Kobotroll (Roland) has done a great job with the new Vision which now does without colour calibration and provides some more nice features. He further is the mastermind behind all strategic and behavioural skills of our robots. Elm (Florian), Zwilling (Martin), T2000 (Stefan T.), Stopfer (Stephan O.), and Don Miguel de Homer (Michael) have all done a great job with hardware setup and development as well as battery management. zkar (Kai), Puro (Daniel), and Kobotroll have put a lot of energy in the development of our new kicker which achieves much better results than the old one. zkar was further responsible for the keeper. Puto, T2000, elllit (Till), Andy (Andres S.), and Endy (Andreas W.) have written just great behaviours which vitalised our robots and made the matches possible. redundant (Hendrik) implemented the new motion control. Without this piece of software, our robots would not have been able to accelerate or slow down in any way! Great work! Finallly we all want to thank Jens wolé (Jens) for the transportation service; indispensable.

The Carpe Noctem Robotic Soccer team 2008