Zunächst ein Wort der Warnung: Für Leute a) immer so pünktlich zur Arbeit fahren, dass sie nicht schnell fahren müssen oder b) nicht viel (am Rücken) schwitzen, werden die folgenden Ausführungen relativ unverständlich bleiben.

Ich bin seit vielen Jahren mit einem (dem selben) Deuter Trans Alpine 30 auf dem Rad unterwegs. Der Trans Alpine ist für mich immer noch einer der glorreichsten Rucksäcke überhaupt: unkaputtbar, sitzt super, kann man auch (kurzzeitig) 10 Kilo mit transportieren ohne das Gefühl zu haben gleich mit dem Rad umzukippen, hat einen Helmhalter und Riesen-Seitentaschen, ist innen unterteilbar (für gute Gewichtssverteilung wenn wenig drin ist) etc. Nur...

One question has been on my mind a lot lately: Doesn't the event-based approach violate data abstraction?

So, RoboCup 2009 is over and ToBI (Team of Bielefeld) plus supporters are safely back in Bielefeld (having endured a 14 hour train-ride back, due to several delays for various reasons). Here is the final photo from the arena


Be sure to congratulate them, when you see them ;-)

The final results are in and Team ToBI achieved 8th place! While not as high as we hoped, the team is proud (and tired ;-) and will now be heading off too celebrate :-)

Well, the second PartyBot attempt didn't fare much better than the first but at least this time the robot left the arena on its own, which gives some points. The problem seems to have been that ToBI was confused by the open door leading to the arena and therefore did not continue to the second room. However, there were no humans in the first room, so we got no points for that.

This seems to be an important take-home message: Edge cases are important for real-world performance.

We just took a photo of all @Home participants and their robots. Yours truly was drafted on the spot to be the "official" photographer. Oh well ;-) Enjoy!

Phew. The PartyBot task was not... entirely successfull, really. Due to technical problems, 6 of 10 minutes were lost and in the remaining 4, not much could be done. Luckily for us, we can repeat it tomorrow, which is very important as we're only competing on 2 tasks, instead of 3. Also, many other teams didn't manage to do it very well, even without technical problems.

So, ToBI just completed the walk and talk, which is sort of the RoboCup version of the hometour. We did quite well in it but it was almost unspectactular after the challenges so far and so the team is already busying itself doing more fun stuff ;-)

For some comic relief, while we're waiting for the next @home task, witness the incredible state of the art (or lack of it) in soccer robots in this short video from the midsize preliminaries.

Team ToBI is 7th in round 1! So, round 2 (or, as Marc would have it: Semi-Finals ;-), here we come! Check the score sheet yourself:

As you can see, the two teams which yesterday were directly before ToBI didn't get any points in the "who is who" task, while we got quite a few. Our open challenge was also quite well received, scoring fourth highest overall in that task.