Team Vossius started as a rescue team with four members, but two left early. At our first match, at the Dutch championships of 2005, we got second. We built a rescue robot out of Lego and programmed it with Coach 5.This didn’t work at all. Kars couldn’t take it anymore so he bought his own Lego RCX set, and we started using RIS 2.0, which worked way better.
This was such a boost that we decided to continue with Robocup and Titus got a Lego set too.

The next year we went to Roboludens 2006 in Eindhoven. Though there were only two rescue teams, we had a great competition. We learned a lot and got to know each other. The other team came from the Mendel College in Haarlem, their team name was “Schalxinators”, but we like to call them just team Mendel.
After Roboludens, we decided to start using NQC, a programming language where text is inputted of silly coloured bricks. We won the national championships and teamed up with team Mendel. Together we went to Bremen, where the World Championships were held that year.
In Bremen we got second in the “mixed team” league: Results

The following year, still teamed up with team Mendel, we started to compete in soccer 2 Vs 2. This year was not very successful because of the late (re)start. We started using the joBot, but we didn’t like it that much, so we switched back to Lego. Mendel started to build custom robots for soccer at the same time as we were building Lego robots together.
We got third in the nationals, which was purely random, since neither we nor the opponents had robot’s “doing” something.

We decided our time for custom robot’s had come too, so we split up with Mendel. We started ordering stuff and designing. We even etched our own printed circuit boards. But things didn’t always go as they should.

We lost some time on various things like finding a way to mount the wheels to the motors and searching for “standard 2-56 threads” (we wouldn’t have to worry about metric threads). AARGH, we spend a month or two trying to find those standard American threads in Holland.
There were only two teams participating in 2 Vs 2 Soccer at the national championship, Mendel and Team Vossius, both with custom robots. We really got owned, but we made major improvements during the day: We lost the first match 18-0 but the last match ended at only 8-3. That’s a 10- 3 difference, in our favour, in half a day!!

The day after the competition, in order to gain valuable time, we started redesigning and ordering more stuff. We had had so much trouble with our motors in 2008, that we badly wanted new ones. We ended up with a great sponsorship deal from Maxon Motors!
All prepped with new motors we started to build a new robot, still taking a lot of time to get some things right. After it was finally assembled, we had the same problems as the year before. The robot wasn’t moving sideways correctly.
We spend about three months trying to figure out how to solve this and get it right. This was valuable time ‘lost’.

With only one and a half month to go before the nationals, we started programming. We did well and won each match with a average balance of seven goals.
With only one month to go before the 2009 world championships in Graz, we worked hard on improving our robots, watching all the video material from the nationals.

In Graz we had a lot of fun. We played a fair number of good matches, though we had a lot of bad luck too. Robots breaking down because of aggressive opponents…. You name it.
We qualified for the finals by winning 5 matches out of 9, entering the finals as 10th. We played a really exciting match against Meister, a Japanese team, and won. In the next round we got beaten pretty badly by Cenatex, a Portuguese team. In the end we got second in the ‘super team’ league.
We flew back home with mixed feelings about Robocup Junior.

In our final Robocup Junior year we had little animo to build new robots. The world championships in Signapore 2010 were too far away, too expensive and would consume too much time. But we couldn't just stop improving the robots.

We spend a lot of time finally getting the dribbler right and even more important the dribbler ball detection. We tried various microswitches, a moving lego dribbler. Finally we got it right.
After we installed the new motor for the dribbler, quite a strong one actually, we decided to give one of our first ideas one last try. We measured both the battery voltage and the voltage of a shunt resistor in serie with the motor. With a lot of maths we should be able to calculate the current flowing through the dribbler, which would increase greatly when the dribbler got hold of the ball. And which IT DID!!!!
With a deadly accurate way to determine ball possession we felt pretty excited. Little did we know then...
During a presentation for a competition at our school both robots malfunctioned. We won the competition, but it turned out that one of the goalie's H-bridge was fried. And the problem on the striker was even worse. The new motor for the dribbler, essentially one big magnet, interfered greatly with our compass.

With only the mysterious "Mu Metal" as a "possible" solution, we were worried. But the Mu Metal, which can be found in old HDD's ( Hard Drive Disks) turned out to be a great solution. When we got hold of another piece of Mu Metal the problem was gone entirely.

With no obstacles left we headed for the nationals. The soccer tables were set up in a room, on a table, where the magnetic field was different on each place on the table. Totally ruining our entire programming. The goalie functioned a little bit, keeping the goals against us at 0 in the first match. But the striker went rogue. Only 4 goals in the first match.

Luckily there were so few teams that the organisation suggested we should try to find a spot on the floor where the magnetic field was steady. THANK YOU! We ended up winning the 2nd match with 13-0 and the 3rd with 11-1.
This was our last competition. Time for university and the Senior league.

Rescue:
2nd place nationals 2005
1st place Roboludens 2006
1st place nationals 2006
2nd place world championships Bremen 2006 (mixed teams)

Soccer:
3rd place nationals 2007
2nd place nationals 2008
1st place nationals 2009
2nd place world championships Graz 2009 (mixed teams)
1st place nationals 2010