In the quarterfinals on Saturday, we played against the CIT-Brains team from Japan and unfortunately lost. Considering that CIT-Brains were the world champions last year, we had expected this outcome and were not too disappointed. Nevertheless, we managed to prevent a few goals. With that, we were eliminated from the competition, but it was our best result since the inception of the Bit-Bots (excluding the virtual competition during Covid-19). However, that wasn’t the last game for our robots at this RoboCup. The hosts and world champions Rhoban invited us to a friendly match at short notice, which was accompanied and filmed by Arte. We agreed and tried to get everything ready for the game as quickly as possible. During the match, our robots were able to showcase their current abilities, although there were some last-minute issues. The game was then called off after the first half, as Arte had limited time, and both teams wanted to conserve their materials. Now our robots could truly rest and recover from the games.

We still wanted to witness exciting games, so the idea arose to arrange a friendly match between the Humanoid League and the Standard Platform League (SPL). In the SPL, all teams play with the same robot model, a “Nao”. This brings some different rules and a slightly different playing field (for example, they play on relatively short grass with a standardized ball, while we can play on long artificial turf with a variety of balls). However, due to their humanoid appearance and compatible size, it was still possible to have the current world champions of both leagues (Rhoban and B-Human) play against each other. We watched with anticipation as the Naos (B-Human) won on the field of the Humanoid League.

For the remaining time of the RoboCup, we engaged with other teams, leading to an exciting experiment: we equipped our robots with the legs of the NUBots and were actually able to make them walk.

With that, the week came to an end, and so did our time in the exhibition hall. Everything was packed up and taken to our accommodation. The next day, we moved to another part of Bordeaux: the university. Here, the symposium, a scientific conference associated with the RoboCup, took place. In addition to attending different talks, we read posters and also presented one ourselves. In the afternoon, we were invited to visit Rhoban’s lab and saw some intriguing robots. With the symposium, the RoboCup concluded, and the following days were used to explore Bordeaux a bit more and head to the sea.