A successful year for the 1. RFC Stuttgart

This year it was the first time I participated at RoboCup tournaments. It was quite stressful but also really exiting and most important: successful!

In April the year started with the German Open in Hanover. It was a hard week, we lived in a bus and worked every day far into the night. But it was worthwhile. After many years of struggle the 1. RFC Stuttgart finale made it and win the German Open!

Here you can see a summary of the final game in Hanover against Osnabrück (Stuttgart = cyan; Osnabrück = magenta):

But this was not the end of our success in 2009. Last week we went to Graz, Austria for the RoboCup world championship. Like a few weeks ago in Hanover it was again a hard week. At the end we went home with two cups! First we won the free challenge with the presentation of our “Automatic Camera Man” and at Sunday we finally won the final and became world champion for the first time!

The tournament started quite well with 6:0 wins in the first round robin. In the second round robin we had our only defeat and finished the round with 3:1 wins. The third round robin ended with 2:0 wins. In the semifinal we won against MRL (Iran) 4:1. Than in the final we met Tech United (Eindhoven, Netherlands) and beat them 4:1 for the world championship.

This is the team which made all this happen:

Below you can see a video, recorded by Tech United, from the final (Stuttgart = magenta; Tech United = cyan).

By the way, all robots are powered by Debian GNU/Linux and the software is developed with C++ and Qt (for graphical tools)…