Magma is back on the World Championship podium

By finishing in third place, team leader Prof. Klaus Dorer, Communication and Media Engineering student Madhurshalini Mahalingam, Angewandte Künstliche Intelligenz students Mike Benz and Sascha Schrempp, doctoral candidate Hannes Braun, and staff member Simon Rösch confirmed their status as co-favorites. In the end, Team Magma was defeated by only two Chinese teams: the new world champion Apollo3D and the new world runner-up Dionysus.

Over the course of the tournament, Magma won twelve of its 15 games, scoring 71 goals and conceding only 8. Their only losses came against Dionysus—0–3 in the second group round and 0–2 in the semifinals—and against Apollo3D, 0–3 in the third group round. Magma won the third-place match against another Chinese team, the Solidworkers, with a score of 3–0.

The new Mujoco simulator was used for the first time at RoboCup: It is significantly more physically realistic and now features Booster’s humanoid T1 robots instead of Nao robots. It became apparent that the Chinese already have more experience with this technology, which was developed in China. “The Dionysus robots were the fastest in the entire field, but they fell over very often. The team’s strongest feature was their ability to kick the ball right out of play. That sometimes took too long for Magma. Although the Apollo players couldn’t run quite as fast as Dionysus, they fell over significantly less often and clearly had the more precise kick,” explained team leader Klaus Dorer. Overall, the progress has been enormous, both with the simulated bipedal robots and their real-life counterparts. The pace of the game has increased dramatically; the robots run much faster and can shoot on goal from any position. And whereas in the real world people used to have to run after the large, slow robots to prevent them from falling if necessary, today all robots play completely autonomously. If one falls, it simply gets back up on its own. The large crowd in Incheon was thrilled.

The fact that Magma remains among the world’s best despite the numerous innovations and rapid developments shows what fantastic work the team at Hochschule Offenburg is doing. Other teams, such as FC Portugal, had significantly more trouble adjusting: The former serial world champion finished this year’s RoboCup in sixth place with zero wins and zero goals. And so the Magma team members are already eagerly looking forward to next year’s home World Cup in Nuremberg.

Anyone who would like to review this year’s RoboCup in detail can find the individual daily reports at Team Magma | Hochschule Offenburg.