The German Open 2012 are over - ToBI finished 7th.
Team ToBI is back in Bielefeld, already starting the preparation for Mexico City and so I would like to wrap-up a few things from the German Open this year:
Well, obviously ToBI performed below its technical capabilities, we did not reach the finals in Magdeburg this year and had some difficulties with the tasks. It would be an easy thing to say that the others where simply better, and for team NimbRo who are the current world champion and won the German Open, this might actually be true. But all other teams where also struggling. So why are we behind them? Maybe the most important reason is that we made some changes within the software architecture and exchanged some important low level components, e.g. SALM/Navigation, BonSAI/Task modeling. Also we changed some hardware configurations, e.g. The mounting of the arm. In the longer run these changes will improve the performance of the robot, in fact they did already in Magdeburg, but these components needed to be tested aswell and e.g. navigation has a huge impact on the overall performance of the robot. The second reason is that team ToBI was hoping for the new rules for 2012 to arrive in time. This unfortunately did not happen and in contrast to most other teams we where mainly preparing for the new rulebook. With the descision for the old rules we had only one week left for getting the tasks up and running AND test them. This was simply not enough time for us, especially with a new team that just started to work with the robot.
