A race against the clock

A mere three weeks before the competition, the whIRLwind team was racing against the clock to train their new robots. The students had used reinforcement learning to prepare their algorithms, strategies and behaviours in simulation, but these don’t always work correctly once transferred to a real robot. To compete successfully, their transformer-based object detection model had to be well integrated with the on-field positioning, and the robots had to make effective use of all the information they received for the football strategy. With all this more or less in place, the students headed to Köln to test their team’s abilities against teams from different German universities.

A penalty kick that made history

The first matches were a steep learning curve, with tweaks being made from the sidelines. The quarter final match however resulted in a 0-0 score and a penalty shoot out. Penalty shots were one of the things that hadn’t been tested yet. Luckily team member Julia de Vries had simulated a new kick as part of her thesis project for the Bachelor's programme in Artificial Intelligence. 10 minutes before the shoot out, the penalty-behaviour was loaded on to the robot. The robot swiftly fired the ball past the goalkeeper, and they won the match, eventually leading to an overall third place.

Congratulations, team whIRLwind!