When we arrived at the hall in the morning we were surprised to find a task to “organise a bouncing castle for the FUmanoids” on our whiteboard. Obviously we were not going to just leave it there, so we build a “miniature bouncing castle for robots” and placed it on their team table. After they arrived and found our artwork we heard laughter and they signalled the task had been finished to their satisfaction.

It doesn’t look that good with the robots, though. The vision seems to work, so we can recognise balls and the behaviour animates the robots to kick if we stand in front of a ball, but walking is still quite difficult and not all robots work correctly. In the end, they and their hardware are getting older, and maintaining had fallen by the wayside.

While we had been working on those problem (and a lot of screws were tightened, hardware- and softwarebugs were fixed, testing took place to figure out what exactly the problems were) we also continued working on the vision, talked to other teams about walking and testet in how far Hambot and Minibot can play in a game.

After a trip to the grocery store we also had Fritz Cola and Mate which hopefully boosted productivity. At least it lifted the mood.

One person of our team had been asked to organise livestreaming and commenting on some games. In the meantime, all robots who want to participate in the RoboCup had to be measured. Robots have to be in certain ranges of measurements, they mustn’t be too tall or too heavy and have to be humanoid enought, otherwise they mustn’t participate. Of course all of our robots passed, it is not their first competition.

At 6 pm (announced via a piercing loudspeaker announcement) the Opening Ceremony began. Speakers were the General Chair of Robocup 2016, the Chief Executive Officer of Leipzig Trade Fair, the Deputy Prime Minister of Saxony, the Mayor of the city of Leipzig, the Head of Unit of Robotic of the European Comission, the Founding President of the Robocup Federation and the General Chair of Robocup 2016.

The Trade Fair, Leipzig and Saxony were promoted, and the audience was reminded of the vision of the future of RoboCup, why we do this and what we do this for, what the goal of all is and how RoboCup helps reach this goal.