Computer science and mechatronics students from the university of Erlangen-Nuernberg constructed and programmed soccer robots in the winter term 2006-2007. The small machines are about 15 centimeters tall with a diameter of about 18 centimeters. Five robots play together as a team, one of them is the goal keeper.

The team from Erlangen is called "ER-Force", its first public match was at the RoboCup German Open in Hannover in April 2007, which was the tenth tournament in the annual German Open series. Luckily, ER-Force made the fourth place in the Small-Size league.

All in all there are eight leagues at the RoboCup German Open: RoboCup@home, Four-legged, Rescue, Humanoid, Mid-Size, Small-Size, 2D- and 3D-Simulation - 46 research teams from all over the world took part in the German Open in 2007.

The Small-Size league has the following characteristics:

• The size of the field is 5 meters times 3.5 meters.
• Two cameras are attached 4 meters above the field and oversee the whole game
• The camera data is processed and interpreted by a server, which sends also commands to the robots
• Since every robot has to have a marker on its top, the cameras are able to properly distinguish the "good" own robots from the adversial team.
• The game consists of two half times with 10 minutes each
• The rules of the game are very similar to real soccer, with few exceptions

The team ER-Force was an interdisciplinary project between students from the chair for pattern recognition (Informatik 5). Three groups of students worked together at the artificial intelligence, video processing and robot construction tasks in order to get the robots kicking the ball. The participation to the German Open was financially supported by the local company infoteam Software GmbH.

Further information to the project, the ER-Force and your participation provide you Patrick Kugler, Christian Riess, and of course the team's webpage.