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Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology

RoboCup

Robot soccer is the fascinating combination of the world's number one team sport and innovative technology. Autonomously acting robots play for victory or defeat.

Results from different research disciplines are directly compared on this problem. The international initiative "RoboCup" promotes research in the fields of artificial intelligence and autonomous mobile robots. For this purpose, international tournaments are organized, which give all researchers the opportunity to test their achievements in direct comparison and thus make progress together.

Our project group consists of scientists, student assistants and computer science students.

 

To get an impression of the current status, you can watch dozens of videos of past competitions on our team homepage.

Nao Devils Dortmund (2009 - ...)

NAO in front of the goal © Robotics Team​/​TU Dortmund
NAO in front of the goal

After the successful participation of the BreDoBrothers in the first season of the Nao Standard Platform League of RoboCup 2008, the team split again into two seperate teams. The Nao Devils, the Dortmund part of the former BreDoBrothers and thus the successors of the Microsoft Hellhounds, competed in RoboCup Graz in 2009 in the Standard Platform League for the first time under this name and have since then continuously taken front places in all world championships and even won two first places in 2016 - in soccer in the Outdoor category and the Technical Challenges.

BreDoBrothers (2006, 2008)

The Kondo KHR-1 in delivery state © Matthias Hebbel​/​TU Dortmund
The Kondo KHR-1 in delivery state

The BreDoBrothers are a merger of the robot soccer teams of the University of Bremen and the Technical University of Dortmund. For the first time, the BreDoBrothers competed at the RoboCup 2006 in the Humanoid League, went their separate ways as DoH!Bots and B-Human in 2007, and then came together again to compete at the RoboCup 2008 in the newly founded Standard Platform League with the prototypes of the robot Nao.

DoH!Bots (2007)

Bender on the field © Robotics Team​/​TU Dortmund
Bender on the field

The team DoH!Bots(Dortmund HumanoidRoBots) emerged from the team BreDoBrothers in 2006. The team consists of 12 computer science students and 2 research assistants from the Institute for Robot Research at the Technical University of Dortmund. We develop and program bipedal robots with the goal of playing soccer fully autonomously on a 4.5 x 3 m field in the context of the Humanoid League. In contrast to the Standard Platform League, the Humanoid League has a strong focus on robot hardware. Accordingly, we have completely redesigned a humanoid robot platform and aligned it with our needs specifically in the areas that fall short in the standard robots (perceptual capabilities, computational capacity). The result is Bender, probably the most powerful platform of the Humanoid League in 2007, which can process 1024x768 omni-vision images in real time with its Core2Duo CPU and thus localize itself with centimeter precision, as well as run ZMP-controlled.

Microsoft Hellhounds (2002 - 2007)

AIBO Group © Robotics Team​/​TU Dortmund
AIBO Group

The league we compete in is called the Sony Four-Legged League (later to become the Standard Platform League). Here, all teams use the same robots, the dog-like Aibos from the Sony company.

We deal with the development of fast walking patterns, the programming of the robots' behavior, image processing as well as communication for global sensor fusion.

Since the first participation in RoboCup 2002, we were World Champions in 2004 and 2005 as part of the GermanTeam, European Champions in 2005 (GermanOpen) and 2006 (DutchOpen), Intercontinental Champions in 2005, winners of the AmericanOpen 2006 and winners of the Technical Challenges of RoboCup 2006.