Ewoud Croll - RoboTeam Twente
Ewoud Croll - RoboTeam Twente
RoboTeam Twente has existed since the beginning of 2016. As chairman I have the honour to develop soccer playing robots in close cooperation with a motivated team of enthusiastic fellow students. In the meantime we have qualified for the prestigious ‘RoboCup’ in Nagoya, Japan: The World Cup robot soccer. We have approached Cimar Electronics to think along with the PCB’s and to become our sponsor for this project.
Last year I, Ewoud Croll, completed his Bachelor Advanced Technology. As I am interested in robots, I came up with the idea to start up this project. This fulltime job is a great challenge. We had to invent everything, from setting up an organizational structure (in our case a foundation), recruiting team members to developing a team of good and smart soccer playing robots.
Our main goal was to qualify for the World Cup in Japan and we succeeded. This qualification included recording and submitting various videos featuring our robots and their skills such as first touch etc. The robots we develop must meet a couple of conditions in terms of size and technology. The biggest challenge is developing and writing smart and self-learning software. That’s what our RoboTeam needs to see through the soccer strategies of the opponent and anticipate them.
In our search on the internet for good and reliable partners we ended up with Cimar Electronics. We sent them an email to introduce ourselves and they immediately reacted enthusiastically; they really wanted to help us in the field of PCB’s. This company is very capable, extremely flexible and communicates transparently. Upon receipt of the prototype PCB we have discussed the choice of specific components. We have received a total of 20 PCB’s for 10 robots. In addition, they even helped us creating a PCB in our own colour, red, really fantastic!