The day started for us at 7:30 with breakfast. Afterwards we headed with suitcases full of hardware and our robots to the hall, which opened at 9 am. We arrived a quarter of an hour early and had to wait in line. We decided to send Nils and Jessica ahead to register us. After an hour they returned with badges and two event-t-shirts for each of us.

With those we were allowed to enter the hall, past the queue and the security control with metal detectors. Inside the hall we organised ourself working space big enough for our team and began with our tasks.

Quickly we set up the infrastructure, carried out tests with our darwin-based robots on the artificial turf, tinkered on the hardware and finished tasks of the Technical- and Organisation Committee (which two of us are part of).

After one and a half hours we met and discussed the results as well as further course of action, after which we continued to tinker on the hardware, especially on the Hambots, and adjusted the software to the field to play on.

There are good news and bad news to this year’s condition: The good one is the artificial turf not being as bad as on the german open, and our small robots being able to walk on this turf. The bad one is just one of the four fields being unproblematic. On one it trickles from the ceiling so that there’s a puddle beside the field. On another there is a big unevenness in front of one goal, so that probably every robot will fall and it’ll be way harder to score on this side. The third field consists of multiple smaller parts which not just cause unevenness but also vary the colour of the turf.

This evening, after the team leader meeting, it will be decided how the groups are spread and on which field we’ll play, as each group will just play on one field so that the conditions are equal for everyone.