[robocup-legged] 11 vs. 11 on a Mid-Size League Field

[Thomas Röfer]

Dear all,

during Dutch Open in Eindhoven, we organized a demo match with 11 by 11
AIBOs on the Mid-Size League field. If we are right, it was the first match
of full teams in RoboCup with real robots. We will have another game
(hopefully with teams from other countries) in Bremen. It is really a pity,
that we cannot continue with the AIBOs in the future. The game was better
than expected, we will send some fotos/videos later. At the same time it
became obvious that there will be a lot of challenges concerning
coordination and cooperation for larger teams.

We used the field with original Mid-Size goals and field lines. The Mid-Size
landmarks appeared to be too high to be recognized from short distances.
Therefore we made new landmarks with the colors of the Four-Legged League
field, 60 cm high and 20 cm wide. 

Since the fields were occupied by the MSL teams most of the time (big
surprise :-), we had very few time for testing. The color blue in the goal
was recognized as black when using short shutter times, but with longer
times it became useful. Because the color of the blue goal matches the color
of blue AIBO uniforms, a red team played against a white team.

We used a simple version of the GermanTeam code with static field regions
for the robots, programmed by Daniel Goehring, Max Riesler, and Sven Oesau.
Because of problems with the wireless network, the match was an experience
of cooperation without communication (actually, sometimes the ball position
was communicated), and it worked not bad. The result: scaling up is possible
to some extend, but there is much room for challenging research on
coordination. 

Hans-Dieter Burkhard, Thomas Röfer, Daniel Goehring