Finally the stress of the preparation is past and the actual World Cup stress can begin.

This morning at 8:30 our robots mounted a plane together with their six-headed team of staff.
At first they went to Amsterdam and from there they flew over the Atlantic Ocean towards Mexico-City where they will be participating at the RoboCup2012 World Cup in the Humanoid Kid-Sized League.

The World Cup is already a success, simply alone to the fact that it got possible for us to participate. The international RoboCup-competition is a unique chance to have a real exchange of experiences with other teams, compare the own skills with those of other teams and learn from each other.
Although the competition itself is not the most important aspect to achieve this, naturally it provides a huge motivation for research and certainly quite a lot of fun for the participants too.
Of course we will try our best to reach a good place, even though this is our first World Cup.

As here is not enough space to individually thank all the people and institutions that have supported us in the last weeks – and the list would inevitably be incomplete, we say an overall thank you to the Department of Informatics at the University of Hamburg whose members and friends have supported us in various ways in the last weeks so that our participation at the World Cup succeeds.