World Champions in Brazil Again
With a confident performance Team Carologistics from RWTH and FH Aachen won the RoboCup Logistics League. Ten teams from around the world competed in the exciting competition in Joáo Pessoa, Brazil, for the 2014 World Champion title. In the RoboCup Logistics League two teams competed against each other with three transport robots on one playing field, constructed based on a production hall.
The robots' are responsible for the flow of goods between individual manufacturing machines. The focus is on being able to react flexibly to different incidents and to ensure a smooth production process through the intelligent cooperation of autonomous robots. The predefined products must be produced on time and delivered just in time.
The Carologistics Team is made up of students and scientists from the institute cluster IMA/ZLW & IfU with the Teaching and Research Area for Knowledge-Based Systems at RWTH and the Robotics Work Group from the Department of Electrical Engineering at FH Aachen. The team was able to continue its success from the German Open and challenge the competition at a consistently high level with its system. In the finals, the Carologistics faced the defending champions from TU Munich, who were stronger this year as a result of their collaboration with the German Aerospace Center or DLR. The finals were quite decisive for the Aachen team, who won with 165 versus 124 points – a new record for the league. "The significant advance is due to the robustness and, primarily, the flexibility of our system – we view the competition in this young league as a robotics task and not as an automatization task," explained team member Sebastian Reuter. "Our computer science colleagues', Tim Niemüller and Alexander Ferrein, years of experience at RoboCup and in robotics was a significant advantage as well."
The RoboCup took place from July 19 to 27, in Joáo Pessoa, Brazil. Aside from the Logistics League, there are numerous other leagues, for example soccer leagues, in which robots resembling humans play soccer against each other.