After we lost our game in the intermediate round against the Bold Hearts, we started to prepare for the technical challenges. Additionally we had time to look around in the hall. The Major and the Junior leagues are in separated halls. The hall for the junior competitions is a closed building and cooled down a bit too much. The hall for the major competitions is not that closed. Due to much air exchange, it’s nearly as warm as
outside. And this is pretty hot and wet here in Brazil. Therefore, all of the teams have free access to drinking water. Furthermore there are cooled meeting rooms in the team area. Mostly they are used for the official meetings, but the teams can also block them for their meetings. But the best arrangement on this Word Championship are the hammocks to relax in. It’s much more comfortable to sleep in there than laying down in a hidden corner of the hall.
As it always happens on major competitions, there are some things not working properly. Quiet often we have
trouble with the internet connection. Yesterday was the first day we were able to use the official wired connection. The days before we plugged a very long cable through the hall. Finally we used the uplink of the Hulks. The Hulks are the standard platform league team using NAO robots, from the TU Hamburg Harburg. Meanwhile, there are still problems with the internet connection, but the wireless on the fields is astonishingly reliable (at least for us) thanks to the members of the technical committee collecting the team WLAN routers, which are used illegally. In the competition area, there are so many official wireless connections, so it’s strictly forbidden, to set up an own wireless. Unfortunately we don’t have a storage rack for our hardware stuff as it was promised in Eindhoven last year. Due to that, there is always very much stuff on our small team table. Luckily our table is placed directly at on of the four fields and close to the visitors area. So, we have many opportunities to talk to visitors. Additionally our robots are a very famous photo motive!
We needs first getting used to having a high presence of policeman additionally to many very helpful volunteers in the competition hall. A lot heavily armed policeman are patrolling especially in the evening after the audience left the venue. There are even more outside at the parking area and at the entrances. However, this seems to be common, because on our way back to the hotel we used to see police at the beach or sidewalk.
We allowed our robots to relax from the stresses and strains of the last days. They took some pictures of themselves about what they experienced in the hall and we will hand them in during the next days. Most of the time they were diligent as always watching other robots playing to learn from their tactics.
