Month: July 2009

Categories
Binary World Excitements Uncategorized Work

My First Experiments With git

Back in 2005, we decided to use Sub­ver­sion scm for the source code man­age­ment in the Carpe Noctem project. This decision survived the last four years but based on what we exper­i­enced during this time – we even managed to somehow blown up our repos­it­or­ies –, the team decided to switch over to git after the World Cham­pi­on­ships 2009. We’ll have to see how things work out now and if people manage to come to grips with the new system.

Today, I tried to merge some changes for the new Spica version. As I main­tained a separate repos­it­ory for this purpose, I wasn’t sure about how well git merges these data. Sur­pris­ingly, it went just smooth. Only about eight simply conflicts needed to be solved. This resulted in my first lightly more complex git tree. Looks inter­est­ing in gitk :)

git history
git history
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Private

Six Months …

… without lies and deception. What a great feeling! Never ever again! :)

Categories
Binary World Excitements RC2009 Uncategorized

RC2009: Some More Notes

I just read an article on heise.de that sum­mar­ises the results of the 13th RoboCup World Cham­pi­on­ships. With a big surprise I dis­covered that Gerhard and his team the b‑it-bots won the RoboCup @home tour­na­ment and became world champion! A really great achieve­ment, my con­grat­u­la­tions — no, con­grat­u­la­tions from the whole team!

Just like the b‑it-bots, the 1. RFC Stuttgart managed to win both, the RoboCup German Open and the World Cham­pi­on­ships 2009. It was a great match against Tech United! Our con­grat­u­la­tions to this great success!

Exultant Mood after RFC's Second Goal
Exultant Mood after RFC’s Second GoalFea­tur­ing Andi
Categories
Excitements Private RC2009

RC2009: Looking Back

It’s been nine years since I first attended a RoboCup tour­na­ment. Back in 2001, the Ulm Sparrows par­ti­cip­ated in the first RoboCup German Open in Paderborn as well as in the RoboCup World Cham­pi­on­ships in Seattle. Until 2005, when I finally left the team, we took part in one more world cham­pi­on­ship – in Padua, the social event of which nobody of us will ever forget, I suppose – and four German Open tour­na­ments.

In 2006, the German Open didn’t take place in favour of the World Cham­pi­on­ships in Bremen. In this year, Kobotroll and I par­ti­cip­ated with our own team, the Carpe Noctem Robotic Soccer team. We attended with a custom built robot platform and software written from scratch, but finished seventh out of 23 par­ti­cipants. It was really great. Since then, we joined all Germany Open tour­na­ments and in 2009 the World Cham­pi­on­ships in Graz.

Because the scene of RoboCup World Cham­pi­on­ships is very inter­na­tion­al, each time in another country, mostly the logistics behind the scenes of a team but also the RoboCup regis­tra­tion fees are very expensive. This is why the Ulm Sparrows as well as Carpe Noctem were not able to take part in every such tour­na­ment.

This year seems to be the last for me in RoboCup. As I do not have any active role within this community any more, it’ll be hard for me to continue as before. Carpe Noctem may be kept alive for some addi­tion­al year(s). I’m nev­er­the­less no member of the team any longer and thus cannot par­ti­cip­ate the same extend as the past years. Maybe some former co-workers want to continue our work in some way. We’ll have to see, don’t know what’s coming next. Maybe it’s the best solution to simply switch over to do something real, something more useful than building soccer-playing robots?

Categories
Binary World Excitements RC2009

RoboCup 2009 in Graz

I would like to thank the whole team for their com­mit­ment to our project, their enthu­si­asm, and their inspir­a­tion. During the last years, we have created a group of just great robots! Even though it is sometimes not that easy, try to keep your level of motiv­a­tion and maybe con­trib­ute your knowledge to upcoming (cool) projects as well! Thanks!

Carpe Noctem at the RoboCup World Championships 2009 in Graz, Austria
Carpe Noctem at the RoboCup World Cham­pi­on­ships 2009 in Graz, Austria
Categories
Binary World Excitements RC2009

RC2009: Match against Tech United

CN:Tech United – 1:4

Ok, once more against Tech United today. Let’s hope for a less crappy game than the last one :) Kickoff is scheduled for 18:30.

It was a great game!

19:22: End Game

19:zz: Goal! CN 1 – 4 Tech United (time unknown)
19:yy: Goal! CN 1 – 3 Tech United (time unknown)
19:xx: Goal! Goal! CN 0 – 3 Tech United (time unknwen)
19:07: Game Started (Second Half)

18:57: Half Time

18:55: Goal! CN 0 – 1 Tech United
18:42: Game Started (First Half)

Categories
Binary World Excitements RC2009

RC2009: Match against 1. RFC Stuttgart

CN:1. RFC Stuttgart – 1:3

Our first match in the third round robin is against the 1. RFC Stuttgart and scheduled for 16:30. We just started pre­par­a­tions for setup.

Bad news: Mops isn’t working any more. Nobody knows what’s (not) happening. So… yes. We’ll have to start now. Ok, it’s the same with every match against Stuttgart: always bad luck. Always! Damn it!

17:33: End Game

17:19: Goal! CN 1 – 3 1. RFC Stuttgart (we fixed the bug; as expected, it was a tiny, tiny damn thing)
17:18: Game Started (Second Half)

17:01: Half Time

16:xx: Goal! Goal! Goal! CN 0 – 3 1. RFC Stuttgart (we played without goalie)
16:46: Game Started (First Half)

Categories
Binary World Excitements RC2009

RC2009: Match against Tech United

CN:Tech United – 0:3

Our next match is against Tech United… well, I suppose that all of you know what that means :) But still, keep fingers crossed! :D

The first half of this game was really inter­est­ing and fun to watch! Both teams were very agile and – at least I’d say so – on a par with each other The second half will defin­it­ively look different, Tech United will quite certainly change their tactics, so … we’ll see.

Yeah, as expected: in the second half, Tech United changed their strategy (they kicked again from their half) and they decreased the timeout when their opponent has to carry out standards. Normally, the team that is not in pos­ses­sion of the ball has to wait for 10 seconds or until the ball has been touched by their opponents. Nothing more to say but the first half was really nice and 0:3 is a realistic result, in my opinion.

13:00: End Game

12:xx: Goal! Goal! Goal! CN 0 &ndash 3 Tech United
12:44: Game Started (Second Half)

12:37: Half Time
12:20: Game Started (First Half)

Categories
Binary World Excitements RC2009

RC2009: Match against MRL

CN:MRL – 0:1

New day, new match. Today, the last two matches of the second round robin will be fought. At 10, we are playing against MRL, at 12 against Tech United. Both matches will be very, very hard. let’s hope for some good results. For the time being, I’ll keep this page updated for the match against MRL.

We lost the match because we had severe problems with ball detection, coordin­a­tion, and our hardware. Even though our goal was empty in almost the entire second half – Mops’ (our goalie’s) motor con­trol­ler behaved weird –, MRL didn’t manage to score one more goal against us. So I think, the match was quite balanced…

During the game, again some component of a robot exploded in a big bang. This time even with fancy light effects :) Appar­ently, the hardware of an MRL robot blew up… but only a few seconds later, the robot was back in the game. Very robust these squeaky robots!

10:50: End Game
10:45: Game Started (Second Half)

10:28: Half Time

10:20: Goal! CN 0 – 1 MRL (time approx)
10:13: Game Started (First Half)

Categories
Binary World Excitements RC2009

RC2009: Press Coverage Again

I just found another picture of one of our robots (Mops in this case) in the internet, more specific on the futurezone website. This time, they mentioned even our team name :)

http://futurezone.orf.at/stories/1612227/

In this article, there’s even a picture of our former Minihops:

http://static.orf.at/vietnam2/images/site/futurezone/20090727/mostlyharmlessjubel.jpg

Update 15:34: An article on heise.de that shows a quite noisy picture of our game against MRL, links to our team website: RoboCup-WM: Explod­i­er­ende Akkus und abstürzende Roboter.