Home
Welcome to the DNT-Beginner2Expert guide. If you have any feedback or topics you would like to see discussed please let us know via the dedicated slack channel!
This guide will teach you the fundamentals you need to work with the NAOv6 robots and the framework we use to operate the robots. Suitable for beginner to intermediate programmers. This guide is written by Fyor Klein Gunnewiek and Jakob Kaiser, based on the work of many before us.
The guide is built up in sections, starting from the basics of using Ubuntu up until contributing code to the Dutch Nao Team (DNT) repository. The sections are independent so if you already master a certain topic, feel free to skip to the next section. If you get stuck at any point, you can contact Fyor or Jakob with any questions, additionally you can ask questions during the weekly question hours or on working days (days on which the entire team works on the project). DNT-Beginner2Export consists of several sections found in the navigation bar to the side. Each section contains a short description of what that section will entail.
The Dutch Nao Team (DNT) is a student team of the University of Amsterdam consisting of computer science students and artificial intelligence students, both Bachelor and Master, supported by a senior staff member, Arnoud Visser. It was founded in 2010 and competes in the Standard Platform League (SPL), a robot football league, in which all teams compete with identical nao robots to play football fully autonomously. The league was started to incentivize the development in robot science. Its current goal is to play against the human world champion in 2050. In the Standard Platform League, all teams use identical robots, which shifts the to software development rather than hardware development. The robots are non-player controlled, and have to be able to play football by themselves. This includes seeing the ball, locating itself and making decisions on how to play next, as well as communicating with teammates.
The Dutch Nao Team debuted in the Standard Platform League (SPL) competition at the German Open 2010. Since their founding, the Dutch Nao Team has been qualified for the world cup competitions in Istanbul, Mexico City, Eindhoven, João Pessoa, Leipzig, Nagoya, Montreal, Sydney, Worldwide and Bangkok.
Besides the major RoboCup events, we have attended multiple GermanOpens, IranOpens, the Humanoid Soccer School 2013, the Mediterranean Open 2011, the Colombia Robotics week, TechFest 2015, the European Open 2016, the Robotic Hamburg Open Workshop 2016 and 2017. At the Benelux Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2016 the team received the award for best demonstration. At the Iran Open 2017 the team received the Award in the Open Challenge with a presentation on our behaviour engine.
During the participation in the RoboCup, the Dutch Nao Team has provided its support or resources in bachelor & master theses and projects that led to publications on a large variety of topics. At the Maastricht University, a PhD student published a paper on learning a more stable gait, compared to the energy efficient gait from earlier work.
In an honours project a comparison was made on ball detection with classical image processing versus modern deep learning techniques. The Dutch Nao Team extended the application of the Nao robot to the @Home league of the RoboCup: the Nao robot was used to help in a kitchen environment by finding a tomato and grabbing it from a table.
Finally, the Dutch Nao Team has made the penalty shootout situation into a standalone demonstration, which it premiered at the Benelux Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2016 and won the first prize for best demonstration. Earlier the Dutch Nao Team has published papers in the International Conference on Advanced Robotics, the Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems Workshop, the RoboCup IranOpen Symposium, the RoboCup Symposium and the international conferences as International Conference on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions.
In 2016, the Dutch Nao Team foundation was founded with the sole purpose of enabling team members of the Dutch Nao Team to attend RoboCup related events. The foundation aids in achieving this goal by making the Dutch Nao Team a legal person, exempted from taxes. This makes it easier for companies to pay for provided services since they do not have to trust an individual team member with using the money for intended purposes.
This goal of the foundation has several consequences:
- Money gathered by the foundation will not be paid out to anybody not joining an event.
- Team members do not get a salary.
- Foundation money will solely be used to pay for expenses of which it can be established that they were needed to join an event, or have promotional value. Examples are: travel costs, hotel costs, visa, Dutch Nao Team stickers and website hosting.
- Since the goal of going to events is to compete in soccer games with robots and everything related to that, the board of the foundation (including the team leader in case he/she is not part of the foundation) will decide on who is capable enough (read: has enough experience and motivation) to help during an event.
- Since there is no guarantee that there will be enough funds for everybody for an event, or even that there will be funds at all, the baseline is that everybody has to pay for themselves. If there are funds available, then chances are these will only be paid out some time after the event.
The current members of the foundation:
- Chair: Lasse van Iterson
- Treasurer: Lex Bolt
- Secretary: Fyor Klein Gunnewiek