Humanoid Soccer with team NimbRo at RoboCup 2023

I have started as a member of the NimbRo RoboCup Soccer AdultSize team about a year ago and have since worked on a ball tracking system to accurately estimate a ball’s future position for the downstream planning algorithms, on the core systems of the robot, as well as repairing, maintaining and building the NimbRo OP2 robots.

Previous to me joining the team has won 5 world championships in the row and the team brings a lot of expertise with it that I was eager to learn. Over the past year, I have learned the key ingredients to a complete robotic system and majorly developed my programming skills in C++ and ROS. Seeing how a championship-winning teams functions from within and seeing such a system implementing, really taught me soft- and hard-skills I would not have been able to learn in my unviersity courses.

Eventhough, we spend major time on preparation in the weeks leading up to the competition, setting up the system at the venue poses significant hurdles due to siginificantly different conditions than our lab conditions. With actuators breaking and repairing, fine-tuning the gait and perception pipeline, as well as the overall behaviors, the two setup days were quite stressful.

THe RoMeLa team team showed up with an impressive new humanoid robot that could potentially sprint and out-pace our robots by far. In our game, they put up a good fight but fortunately they themselves did not have full control of their robot and could unleash its full potential; to protect themselves they even had to wear chin pads ;). In an interesting match we beat RoMeLa with a score of 10:0.

In the end, we face the HERoEHS team in the finals. In a competitive, but one-sided match, we managed to win by 8:0 and win the world championship in robotic soccer in 2023. With an astonishing 66:0 goal differential, this was one of the best performances of team NimbRo. The competition itself was a great success and the hard work in the previous months really paid off. Moreover, meeting like-minded people from the different teams was a great pleasure. Sharing knowledge and having drinks at the after-party was a great pleasure. We gained many new and meet some old friends from all over the world!