News September 2008
The 12th RoboCup World Football Championship was held in Suzhou, China with 24 teams competing for the coveted title. But the eventual 4th place winners could not have taken part successfully if it wasn't for the technical expertise from a Cambridgeshire software-company.
Software Verification Ltd, based in Cambridgeshire, provided the German team, 'Darmstadt Dribblers' with vital software tools to ensure the robot footballers were performing to their best abilities.
"Earlier in the year we received an unusual request from some students at Technische Universität Darmstadt who were building autonomous football playing humanoid robots to compete in various championships around the world," explained Software Verification's Stephen Kellett. "Of course, we were intrigued and sent over one of our software packages to iron out some of the problems. It seemed to do the trick and the team were unlucky not to have been overall winners but they did come up against last year's winners -- also from Germany -- and two very skilled Japanese teams and were the only team in the world to master the technical double-pass challenge. A great performance all the same!"
The software sent over to Darmstadt was 'Performance Validator' -- a system that provides automatic source code performance analysis (profiling) of applications as they run. It does not require a special build or any changes to an existing application and does not cause significant drops in performance.
Sebastian Petters of Darmstadt Dribblers was delighted with the results. "Thanks to this software we were able to identify and remove some bottlenecks in our application. Due to code and algorithm improvements based on the analysis with 'Performance Validator' we could raise the number of processed frames per second of our robot's vision system from about 4-5 to 15-17, which make a huge difference in our highly dynamic environment. 'Performance Validator' has become an irreplaceable tool for our project!"
Software Verificationcontinues to watch with interest the achievements of the 'Darmstadt Dribblers' -- in the knowledge that the company has played a crucial role in creating world-class footballers.
Notes to Editors
Software Verification Ltd provides software engineering tools to rapidly detect and fix memory leak detection, code coverage, performance profiling, thread lock contention analysis and thread deadlock detection, flow tracing and application replay on Windows Vista, 2003, XP, 2000 and NT platforms. The company also supplies software tools for traditional desktop applications, services, server applications and AJAX style web applications - supporting C++, C#, Visual Basic, VB.Net, Delphi,Fortran 95, Java, JavaScript, Lua, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby.
Software Verification Ltd is a client of Terry Forsey.
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