Department of Computer Science
b-it-bots with a start-to-finish victory: RoboCup World Champions
"It is a fantastic achievement by our students," university president Hartmut Ihne is pleased to say. "Robotics has been one of our university research priorities for years and the team from the Autonomous Systems Master's programme has shown that it is of world class."
German Champion at the RoboCup in Magdeburg
As in other sports, successful participation in the world championship required long and intensive preparation. The six students and their team captain Deebul-Sivarajan Nair had invested a lot of free time in the past months to make the robots fit for the big tournament. A promising stage was winning the German championship at the RoboCup German Open in May, also in the @work league. In Australia, the work robot narrowly beat the robOTTO team from the University of Magdeburg in the final. The b-it-bots are coached by computer science professors Paul Plöger and Gerhard Kraetzschmar.
For Plöger, it was a well-deserved, albeit close, victory after long years of optimisation and winning the vice world championship last year. The so-called Basic Manipulation Test can be considered a benchmark for the state of software development. In the rotating table test, in which objects are grabbed from a rotating table, the b-it bots team was even the only team to successfully remove objects from the rotating table. The success of Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in the field of robotics continues at today's RoboCup Symposium, where three working groups will be able to present their results in papers and posters.
Competition and team
The @work league of the Robocup is about accomplishing logistical tasks, or more precisely: robots have to perform various kinds of work in warehouses and production facilities independently. The competition arena is accordingly a room with low side walls and markings on the floor. There, the robots have to orientate themselves independently and do their work. The challenge is to correctly grasp different objects, transport them and put them down again correctly and undamaged. The @work league uses the youBot robot platform from Kuka. Each team can modify the platform according to their own ideas.
The b-it-bots team is made up of students from the international master's programme Autonomous Systems at the H-BRS and their team captain and research assistant Deebul-Sivarajan Nair. This interdisciplinary programme combines content from robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning as well as programming and prepares students to solve complex problems in robotics or other autonomous systems such as self-driving cars.