The RoboCup German Open 2009 are over, now we are all eagerly looking forward to the World Championships in Graz in June/July this year.

The last week was very challenging, especially for the team members that are new to the RoboCup circus. We arrived on Saturday, started making our team area more comfortable and also began to setup our robots. We — that is Oli, one of the team leaders of 1. RFC Stuttgart and me — scheduled the preliminary games to be started in Tuesday. This allowed the teams to prepare and setup their robots the whole weekend and on Monday. In the night of Monday to Tuesday, some of us stayed at the hall to further tune the robots and optimise their behaviour. Because of insurance issues or whatever reason, people are not allowed to sleep on the fairgound so the night was long and quite hard. Compared to the German Open in Paderborn some years ago where it was allowed to do whatever you want during the tournament, this was really annoying.

Nevertheless, we managed to be ready for our first games on Tuesday. We won the first but lost the second against Tribots: they scored their goal in the very last second of the game, nevertheless very frustrating for us to be honest.

On Wednesday, we again won the first game but tied with 1. RFC Stuttgart. They received only this single goal in the whole tournament and finally won the German Open 2009.

On Thursday, our first game was scheduled at 10:50 against Tech United. In the first half of the game, we had severe network problems because of excessive use of the available bandwidth. This might be because somebody copied large files or whatever over the network, we do not know what happened. Such prolems have been observed several times during the tournement but compared to the last years, network problems have been very moderate in Hannover. Because our robots were unable too coordinate their game plans and because of some hardware problems, we received four goals in the first half. The second half was much more balanced and Tech United didn’t manage to shoot another goal. The second game on Thursday we won again and finally entered the semi finaly.

All final games were scheduled for Friday. We first had to play against 1. RFC Stuttgart again. It was a high class match, very balanced, and also attractive for spectators. During the night from Thursday to Friday, Stefan Triller (aka Trillman) and Hendrik Skubch (aka Hendrik)– I hope that I did not forget any other team member involved here — implemented a new behaviour for the robots that enables them to shoot a pass diagonally across the playground. Another play then tries to receive the ball. Indeed, this is a very risky maneuvre and it succeeds only seldomly, simply because we were not able to test and tune it thoroughly. It neverthless looks awesome and really surprised all other teams! Great done Stefan and Hedrik, Roland and Daniel but also Andres Witsch (aka Endy) for bugging Stefan to implement it! Most likely, all major teams will present a similar move during the World Championships in Graz.

Our last match against Tech United was again very fast and attractive. Even though we lost it, it impressively showed the skills of our robots but even more important of the members of the team! We achieved a very good goal ratio of 19:12 that we try to improve in Graz.

Once again thanks to all team members and friends for their support! Carpe Noctem managed to implement a very competitive platform, regarding hardware as well as software, in only about one year back in 2006. During the last three years, we constantly improved the overall performance even though the hardware platform is now a bit aged and badly needs some major updated. As we are all computer scientist, the most important improvement for us is in the software: Our new plan modelling solution based on ALICA allowed us to create highly complex cooperative behaviour plans that enable our robots to cope with challenging, dynamically changing situations.

I want to explicitly mention one last thing here, because it improved the experience not only for spectators at out playground but also served as a great source of informaton for all teams in the middle-size league: Out playground was equipped with a beamer and a quite large silver screen. It was ment to be a an information panel for advertising important matches. As there was no viable solution available for displayig these information, and even more important as it was not possible to display the current state of the match, Martin Segatz (aka Zwilling) wrote a simple webpage with a live webcam shot updated every second and the more current information on the past, current, and future games — the well-known Carpe Noctem Cam. Together with Stefan Niemczyk (aka Taker), they improved the layout and the presentation of available information. In a team leader meeting, we planned to use somethin similar in Graz as well. Great done Martin and Stefan!

We are now all looking forward to the RoboCup World Championships in Graz where we expect some high-class matches. I personally hope that I can join the team again during this tournament :)

For those of you who want to see our robots in a real match, please have a look at these two short videos provided by Tech United: