Hector Darmstadt - Heterogeneous Cooperating Teams of Robots

On saturday, october 02, team Hector for the second time participated in the Robot Day, which was organized by the company SICK.
The setting was more or less the same as last year: in a convex parcours, the robots had to autonomously find and approach large digits, either in ascending order from 0 to 9, or descending from 9 to 0. This year's parcours was indoor (in 2009 it was outdoor), and therefore it was much smaller, which made it easier to locate the numbers.

This image was uploaded with the post RoboCup: Mapping Training.

Mapping works:

Now we're working on the algorithm that decides where to drive next.

We were very unlucky at our last mission. At the beginning, we had some hardware problems, but these could be fixed after a minute.
Our Mexican partner team started their teleoperated robot first, but this time they had problems with the steep ramp and did not get to the victim.
Shortly after we started the autonomous behvaior, the robot's computer shut down (also autonomously), and we had to restart the mission. Unfortunately, this happend every 2 minutes, therefore the robot did not find a single victim.

This image was uploaded with the post RoboCup Mission5: 2 Victims.

For the semifinals, we merged our team with Ixnamiki from Mexico. They have a tele-operated tracked robot, but no autonomy, therefore our complementary approaches can be operated simultaneously.
After very short time, the mexican operator managed to let the robot climb up a steep ramp and found a victim there. Unfortunately, directly after that, the robot's software crashed and the robot could not go on.

Today, both of our missions were successful.
In Mission 3 we scored 1 victim. The robot also detected a second one, but when approaching it lost it again and hence did not score.

In the second mission, the official Wireless LAN was very unstable, therefore we could not see what was goining on in the behavior. After several resets, we switched to our own router, but we had only 3 minutes left. 10 seconds before the end of the mission, the robot stoped in front of a victim, but the robot did not notify the operator before the mission ended. However, the referee noticed that the victim was identified. Hopefully, this victim is counted for the overall scores, but we don't know it yet.

In the first mission, the robot found one victim autonomously and learned a precise and large map of the arena. Unfortunately, the robot was not aware of step too large to negotiate and got stuck, therefore we had to reset the mission.
So far, we were the only team that scored a victim autonomously, all other teams only scored victims teleoperated in the orange and red arena.

This morning we arrived at Suntec center. Today is Setup-Day, we're just preparing the robots, the arena is almost complete. We're looking forward to an exciting RoboCup week.