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2009-07-05: RC2009: Looking Back comments

It’s been nine years since I first atten­ded a Rob­oCup tour­na­ment. Back in 2001, the Ulm Spar­rows par­ti­cip­ated in the first Rob­oCup Ger­man Open in Pader­born as well as in the Rob­oCup World Cham­pi­on­ships in Seattle. Until 2005, when I finally left the team, we took part in one more world cham­pi­on­ship – in Padua, the social event of which nobody of us will ever for­get, I sup­pose – and four Ger­man Open tournaments.

In 2006, the Ger­man Open didn’t take place in favour of the World Cham­pi­on­ships in Bre­men. In this year, Kobotroll and I par­ti­cip­ated with our own team, the Carpe Noctem Robotic Soc­cer team. We atten­ded with a cus­tom built robot plat­form and soft­ware writ­ten from scratch, but fin­ished sev­enth out of 23 par­ti­cipants. It was really great. Since then, we joined all Ger­many Open tour­na­ments and in 2009 the World Cham­pi­on­ships in Graz.

Because the scene of Rob­oCup World Cham­pi­on­ships is very inter­na­tional, each time in another coun­try, mostly the logist­ics behind the scenes of a team but also the Rob­oCup regis­tra­tion fees are very expens­ive. This is why the Ulm Spar­rows as well as Carpe Noctem were not able to take part in every such tournament.

This year seems to be the last for me in Rob­oCup. As I do not have any act­ive role within this com­munity any more, it’ll be hard for me to con­tinue as before. Carpe Noctem may be kept alive for some addi­tional year(s). I’m nev­er­the­less no mem­ber of the team any longer and thus can­not par­ti­cip­ate the same extend as the past years. Maybe some former co-workers want to con­tinue our work in some way. We’ll have to see, don’t know what’s com­ing next. Maybe it’s the best solu­tion to simply switch over to do some­thing real, some­thing more use­ful than build­ing soccer-playing robots?

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This entry was posted on Sunday, 05 July 2009 at 07:26 and is filed under Excitements, Private, RC2009. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “RC2009: Looking Back”

  1. Uwe Linck Says:
    July 5th, 2009 at 14:43

    This sounds like you’re really said to leave the team. That’s prob­ably as appro­pri­ate as it’s not sur­pris­ing after almost a dec­ade of robot soc­cer. Must be a feel­ing like you spent your youth on this? ;-)

    I read on heise new­s­ticker about people rais­ing your final ques­tion. Not nec­cessar­ily as a reth­or­ical one which I is what I assume you’re doing here. Well, I’m going to let those have their opin­ions but hav­ing no imme­di­ate bene­fits you can reap profits from has been, is and will more prob­ably than not still be the char­ac­ter­ist­ics of fun­da­mental research in 2050.

    When will people stop to tell that our daily work and/or research should rather be mar­tyr­dom than fun? (And cre­ativ­ity … beware of that. It’s evil. ;-))

  2. phbaer Says:
    July 5th, 2009 at 16:29

    Oh you’re right, you’re right. I actu­ally don’t know what’s com­ing next, if Rob­oCup will con­tinue to be that “part of my youth” :) It actu­ally was but… that youth’s not yet over! :D

    Some minutes ago, just after the 1. RFC Stut­tgart won their match against Tech United and there­with became World Cham­pion, some mem­bers of other teams that I know very well (the teams and the people :)) invited me to the next year’s tour­na­ments. I’ll have to see, maybe it’s pos­sible to con­tinue with Rob­oCup being such a hobby but still many issues have to be solved (where to get the money from for four new robots, for example).

    And yes, I believe that work/research must be fun. If it is or gets evil… you can just give up :)

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