MilestoneDDLitLab student group presents paper and poster at RoboCup 2025 in Brazil

11 August 2025

Photo: UHH / Güldenstein

Florian Vahl, Jan Gutsche, Jörn Griepenburg and mentor Jasper Güldenstein are part of the ‘Hamburg Bit-Bots’ research team. They received funding for their project ‘E2E Robot Soccer’ as part of the fourth round of student research groups in the DDLitLab.

With the upcoming publication of their own paper, the group has now achieved a great success. The paper is already available as a pre-publication and was presented as part of a poster session in front of hundreds of interested people at RoboCup2025 - represented by Jan Gutsche and mentor Jasper Güldenstein - in Salvador, Brazil.

The RoboCup is an annual international research competition focussing on autonomous robotics and artificial intelligence. The disciplines include playing football with four-person teams of autonomous, human-like robots.

In the DDLitLab student project, the group used recordings of past RoboCup matches in which both their own and other teams' robots had taken part. These recordings contain data on sensor measurements, tactical decisions made and actions performed by the robots. Based on this information, a so-called diffusion model was developed and trained - a technique that is also known from image generators such as StableDiffusion. The resulting model is called SoccerDiffusion.

The key finding of the publication is that robots can successfully imitate simple movement sequences such as walking, kicking or looking around from the recordings with the help of the tested SoccerDiffusion model. They also react to their environment, for example by getting up again independently after a fall.

The publication of the paper emphasises the success of the student group. The DDLitLab is delighted with this result and would like to thank the group for their comprehensive commitment and wish them all the best for the final spurt in the project.

^{Photo: Research group}