“It started in great suspense, for you never know how two programs that were written independently from each other will react to each other. There was great relief after the first goal and the second half saw a genuine flood of goals”, as Hoogendijk summarizes the final in the premier league of the Robo Cup competition.

That there was cheering and clapping for robots that are incapable of perceiving this does appear a bit odd to him as well now. “Still, robot football is getting to be more and more fun to watch, as it is just like the real thing. Our TURTLEs can communicate with each other. They can dribble well because team members feed them information about opponents that are lurking out of sight. And when a robot fails, they detect that and determine mutually which role has gone and which one can take over. A robot that has a less important role at that moment can position itself between the posts then.”

Other pluses of the Tech United team are the possibilities to anticipate the positions of the opponents during a throw-in and the agility of not losing the ball while dribbling backwards. “In the final this resulted in as many as three goals.”

Now the Tech United team has great expectations of its participation in the World Championship in Singapore, from 19 thru 25 June. “We keep improving things. Now we shall start to work on better man-to-man coverage, which was adequately shown for the first time at this EC by the team from Stuttgart.” (NS)/.