Dr. Tim Laue

RoboCup

Since the year 2000, I have been involved with robots playing football and I have participated in all RoboCup world championships as well as all RoboCup German Open and European Open tournaments since 2002. This page briefly describes all teams that I was a member of (in reverse chronological order). Furthermore, references to all published team description papers and team reports are given at the bottom of this page.

B-Human

Standard Platform League, 2009 - today

For many years now, B-Human is our only RoboCup team. And it is the by far most successful one! B-Human has won numerous world champion and regional titles, as well as several side competitions. As the team is still active, no description of the current status is given here. All relevant and current information are given on the B-Human website.

However, the current success of B-Human must be considered at least partly in the context of all the other teams that we had before and that are described below. When we started to compete with this team in 2009, we already had a complete software stack for humanoid robot football. This gave us a huge head start over most other teams, who still had to switch from the Four-legged League or who started from scratch. As of today, concepts and even lines of code from our previous teams can still be found in our software.

B-Human @ Humanoid League

Humanoid KidSize League, 2007 - 2008

After having gained first experiences in the Humanoid League with the BreDoBrothers, the new B-Human team decided to keep its software base but to switch its hardware platform to the Bioloid construction kit by ROBOTIS. This enabled us to build larger and more powerful robots. Along with major software improvements, this finally led to a team that was capable of actually playing football and to score goals. During the competitions in 2007 and 2008, B-Human won several games and even reached the quarter finals at RoboCup 2007. Overall, the B-Human Humanoid team can be considered as having been a robust middle-class team. Eventually, the software was already quite sophisticated but the cheap and simplistic hardware platform was not able to compete with the top teams (at least our robots had pretty faces). This is a close parallel to our SSL team B-Smart and not very surprising, as we are all computer scientist without any major hardware skills. To overcome this limitation, we decided to stop our Humanoid League activities in late 2008 and to join the Standard Platform League as team B-Human.

BreDoBrothers

Humanoid KidSize League + Standard Platform League, 2006 + 2008

In 2005, multiple construction kits for small humanoid robots, such as the Kondo KHR-1, were available at affordable prices. This gave rise to the idea of entering the Humanoid League and we started to build our first humanoid system in late summer. However, as entering a new RoboCup league is a difficult undertaking, we joined forces with colleagues and students from the Universität Dortmund and founded the BreDoBrothers team. We participated in the Dutch Open and the RoboCup 2006, but our system, especially the hardware, was not competitive at all. However, we were able to port huge parts of our existing software from our Four-legged League team, as documented in this paper. After having made valuable experiences in this first year, the BreDoBrothers decided to split up into two Humanoid League teams: B-Human (see paragraph above) and the DoH!Bots (Dortmund Humanoid RoBots).

Although the BreDoBrothers did not go down in the RoboCup annals as a successful team, the decision of an early entry into the Humanoid League turned out to be wise in retrospect. In January 2006, Sony surprisingly announced the end of the AIBO robot. This meant that the Four-legged league in its current form had to come to an end, too (the last competition was held in 2008). The search for a successor standard platform led to the decision of using the Aldabaran NAO from 2008 on, a humanoid robot. For starting with this new platform, we revived the BreDoBrothers again and participated in this new version of the Standard Platform League in RoboCup 2008. Unfortunately (in the truest sense of the word), we only reached the quarter finals in a competition that was - for several reasons - more shaped by chance than by technical brilliance. After RoboCup 2008, the BreDoBrothers split up and founded two new teams again: B-Human and the Nao Devils

B-Smart

Small Size League, 2003 - 2009

In parallel to my activities in the Bremen Byters team, I joined B-Smart (Bremen Small Multi-Agent Robot Team) in 2003. This was also the first year, in which the team qualified for the RoboCup and participated in the RoboCup German Open. After some tough first years, B-Smart managed to build and maintain a robust robot platform that was capable to do on the pitch what our software commanded. In the final years of the team (2007-2009), we always reached the RoboCup quarter finals and won the RoboCup German Open 2008. Nevertheless, due to the huge success of B-Human in the Standard Platform League and our realization that we would not be capable to build Small Size robots that could be on par with those of the top teams, we decided to disband the team at the beginning of 2010.

In addition to my work for the team, I was also an active member of different committees of the Small Size League. In this context, I contributed to the introduction of the centralized standard vision system for this league, called SSL-Vision.

The Bremen Byters and the GermanTeam

Four-legged League, 2001 - 2006

I started my RoboCup activities in the year 2000 by joining a two-year student project that had the goal to participate in RoboCup competitions. Eventually, four teams emerged from this project: Virtual Werder (which already existed before the start of the project) and the BUGS (Bremen University Goal Seeker) in the 2D Simulation League, B-Smart in the Small Size League (see paragraph above), and the Bremen Byters in the Four-legged League (formerly known as Sony Four-Legged League). The latter was the team to which I contributed. Since at the beginning of our project, the participation in RoboCup world championships was restricted for this league, the Bremen Byters only participated in regional competitions (and were moderately successful). For the international competitions, we joined forces with the AIBO Team Humboldt (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin), the Darmstadt Dribbling Dackels (Technische Universität Darmstadt), and the Microsoft Hellhounds (Universität Dortmund). Together we were the GermanTeam. The greatest successes during my membership were the world champion titles in 2004 and 2005.

Team Description Papers and Team Reports

RoboCup teams regularly publish reports about their current status and recent technical developments. This could be the so-called Team Description Papers, which are short summaries that are submitted before a RoboCup, or documents that accompany a code release, which could be quite lengthy and provide many technical details, published after a RoboCup. In general, these reports are not considered to be scientific papers and they are not peer-reviewed. The documents are usually published on the teams' websites or on the respective website of the league. In early years, they have also been published as part of the official RoboCup Symposium (Pre-)Proceedings.

Below is a list of all reports that I co-authored, sorted by team. The content of most of these reports is probably not relevant anymore, but it might provide a historical review of some early aspects of RoboCup. Please note that some B-Human reports, the so-called Champion Papers, are not listed here, as they were peer-reviewed and are thus listed in my list of academic publications.

B-Human

More is coming soon. In the meanwhile, have a look at B-Human's list of publications.

B-Human @ Humanoid League

BreDoBrothers

B-Smart

GermanTeam