Back from South Africa

For the last two weeks I've been in South Africa to work with our fellow researchers and present our robots.

For our participation in the Standard Platform league with the Nao robots we are cooperating with the University of Cape Town (UCT) and TU Graz. I've been to Cape Town to work with our fellows from the Robotics and Agents Research Lab at the UCT. I gave presentations of our robot software framework that we've developed during the last two years to get more students interested. We discussed the future of the project and how to proceed from the current state. Since we have to robots for not even half a year a lot of work remains to be done. I'm confident however that with joint forces we can achieve a good result for next year's RoboCup event.

Along the way we installed Fedora on two Mac Laptops. Once as a virtual machine and once via boot camp. Both worked just fine and allowed for efficient usage of our robot software framework. Although Slackware and Ubuntu are more dominant in that lab Fedora is the only distro at the moment providing all required libararies out-of-the-box, as I maintain a few of the required packages. Our new robot software framework is Open Source software and we plan for a first public release around the end of this year.

After the research meating I flew to Johannesburg were we were invited by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research to participate on the German booth at the The International Science, Innovation and Technology Exhibition 2008 (INSITE). We've been to the last INSITE as well in 2006, so we met a lot of people again that participated a second time as well. It was fun again to discuss with all the science people various topics and get to know what others are doing.

We presented one of our Nao robots and the research cooperation with the UCT. There was a second robotics booth Robotics SA sponsored by the IEEE comprised of several South African universities and research facilities showing their robots. Our colleagues from the UCT were there demonstrating their custom-made small size league robots, allowing remote control by visitors, and another of our Nao robots.

The event attracted more visitors overall than last time. Though the audience wasn't fully what we would have liked to see. There were only a few university lecturers and not as many students as we expected, although Johannesburg itself having two universities and Pretoria with another two international universities only being a one-hour drive away. Besides that we had several interesting conversations and Alex gave a short talk at the Robotics SA booth about the RoboCup idea.

Afterall I'd say it was a pretty successful trip to South Africa,xturl and a fascinating one. In Cape Town I had two days where I could meet with other students and where I saw some of the country side and I went up to Table Mountain which gave a great view over the city. In Johannesburg I had half a day were I went to the Apartheid Museum. Besides the wealth of information about recent South African history it provides it was very impressing. I went there with a friend from India. We bought tickets - and I got one for whites and she for non-whites. A guard was guiding us to the "matching" entrance. That was really weird. You then walk separated ways inside the first building only communicating through a curtain with each other. The texts are different on boths sides so you have to tell each other what it's all about. She said "ok, just get out and take the back entrance to see this picture here". Sounded like a good idea, I left the building and then... realized that you had to get up to an elevated way that guided you past the non-white exit. Just after 10 meters or so you could then go back and down to be able to get to the other side. But by then we decided to go on. A really weird experience that just felt wrong...

There are some photos from the INSITE 2008 in our gallery. We've also recently uploaded pictures from RoboCup 2008 in Suzhou, China.