In the past we often had to experience that the wireless network did not work as reliable as we would have liked it to be. So we eagerly searched for possibilities of recognizing the referee even without a working Gamecontroller.

Usually the referee uses a whistle to start the play after the game state SET, so we developed an approach based on Fast-Fourier-Transformation and analysis of the extracted spectrum which looks promising.

In the picture, it can easily be seen that a specific frequency is dominant throughout a given time. If our robots are manually set to the game state SET and the game is ready to start, this can be used as a help for the decision when the game state should change to PLAY.

Maybe this might even give us a small advantage in a match with a working GameController, as it usually has a delayed reaction.

We will see…