The following Open Source Submissions were made by the teams via email
luhbots – luhsoccer_simulation
Dear SSL Community,
we, the luhbots soccer team, are happy to announce our submission for the Open Source Award 2026. This year we would like to present a new simulation framework for the SSL.
The aim of this simulator is being able to speed up simulation time, with the long-term goal of eventually using it to train AI models aimed at specific tasks to aid our strategy.
Some of it’s main features are:
- A rigid body physics simulation of the robots and the ball.
- Decoupling of the simulator and the network components, allowing embedding the simulator into other programs and specifying the time step size.
- An implementation, compliant with the official SSL-protocols.
- Being able to be used as a drop-in replacement for other SSL-simulators.
The source code and documentation can be found on our GitHub page: https://github.com/luhbots/luhsoccer_simulation
Furthermore our new software is now also available at this address: https://github.com/luhbots/luhsoccer_trioxide
Best regards
Tim Füchsel
luhbots soccer
TIGERs Mannheim – SSL Tracking Camera Gimbal
Dear SSL Community,
I hereby submit a completely new generation of TIGERs robots for the Open-Source Award. Don’t be afraid, they have no wheels, they are not playing on the field, and still they are pretty awesome!
In the repositories listed below you can find all the files for a 2-axis (pan, tilt) camera gimbal system. It is powered by a single PoE connection and understands the SSL Tracking Protocol. Just put it next to the field, punch in its location and it will happily track the ball all-day long. So that your camera always gets the perfect shot at the action.
It is made of a cheap Raspberry Pi Zero, a custom driver board with STM32G4 microcontroller (featuring field-oriented control), some off-the shelf components (PoE hat, display, motors) and a few 3D printed parts. The firmware even has jerk-limited trajectories to ensure maximum smoothness when following the ball.
There are two variants available. One small one for an action cam and a bigger one to mount our various league streaming cameras. The small variant has already been extensively tested and an earlier version of that was successfully used at the Schubert Invitational Tournament in spring in Germany.
You can find all the hardware (mechanics, electronics) here:
https://github.com/TIGERs-Mannheim/gimbal-hardware
Software running on the Pi is here:
https://github.com/TIGERs-Mannheim/gimbal-rpi
And the firmware for the microcontroller here:
https://github.com/TIGERs-Mannheim/gimbal-mcu-firmware
As an additional bonus, we also open-sourced our buildroot configurations to build custom Linux images here:
https://github.com/TIGERs-Mannheim/tigers-buildroot
The OS running on the gimbal is also made by buildroot and the gimbal-rpi repository also contains instructions on cross-compiling to
ease remote development and debugging.
The buildroot setup may be of particular interest to other teams using a Raspberry Pi in their infrastructure. It features an A/B style update system (also remotely) and a read-only root file system with overlay for user changes. So you can still make changes, but it doesn’t break if you just power it off as well.
Best regards,
Andre Ryll
TIGERs Mannheim
The Bots – Solenoid Active Dampening
Hello SSL Community,
The Bots would like to submit a new ball receiving method using the existing kicker solenoids found on most SSL robots for the Open Source Award. Officially, its title is Solenoid Active Damping, which refers to the method by which a ball is damped – using the electromechanical energy found on robots with active control of the kicker solenoid to stop the ball. This method completely decouples the ball receiving damping needed from the ball dribbling damping needed, where the one tends to affect the other.
In general, SSL robots that use a capacitor based kicker board have a significant amount of energy sitting unused during the receiving of a pass. That energy can then be used to keep the kicker extended after a short kick at the exact threshold where the kicker would otherwise collapse with any extra applied force. You can imagine the solenoid active damping similar to when one stops a soccer ball by pulling their foot back to absorb the energy as the ball gets to their feet. In a similar way, the solenoid is held with minimal possible force so that when the golf ball contacts it, the energy is almost completely damped as the wall collapses from under it.
In the repository below, you can find the detailed documentation (as a README file) for the Solenoid Active Damping system with relevant code used for our RP2040 on the Chicker board in micropython. The important takeaway from this code is not the exact syntax shown in micropython for the RP2040, but rather the concept of how the implementation is formed – this is because each team’s kicker boards will differ based on the chip used.
You can find all the documentation, relevant code for the RP2040, and videos from later testing (not on the TDP) here:
https://github.com/sfunderbots/Electrical/tree/main/Chicker/solenoid-active-damping
Associated full code for the RP2040 on The Bots Chicker board here for reference:
https://github.com/sfunderbots/Electrical/tree/main/Chicker/firmware
Note that the code shown here is not the most recent version – the latest includes a fix to compensate for the voltage on the high voltage net lost over time, which is described in the README.
We hope this open source system will help new teams wanting to keep cost and complexity of their robot low, by utilizing already existing hardware from the robot’s kicker board used to kick a ball to be used in reverse. Subsequently, this system also aims to improve pass receiving performance without the need of a dribbler.
Thank you for your consideration,
~Henry Bryant
The Bots