The long awaited new member has arrived just in time for the crucial phase of the season. From now on Fiona will be joining the Hamburg Bit-Bots. Now she has to show her power in the final training camp if she wants to score a place in the starting formation at the GermanOpen. This could be bad news for the lastly disease-ridden Atlas. However there are also unconfirmed rumors, that Atlas is working hard on a comeback as a goalkeeper.

But even if Fiona should not join the starting formation, the management will keep an eye on her and her play after half-time break at the latest.
Regardless of the potential tension, we are very happy about her arrival and keep our fingers crossed for a quick success.

After a thrilling final match with a lot of chances for both teams Team Darwin from the USA won 7:4 against AUTMan from the Iran. Congratulation.

Just now the 3rd place match has ended. With 5:1 the ZJUDancer from China have won against the CIT Brains Kid from Japan.

Yesterday it was the eighth day here in Eindhoven and the long days slowly undermine our strength. Nevertheless we were active in development and exchange with other teams.

At the quarterfinal we kept our fingers crossed for the Fumanoids – unfortunately unsuccessfull as they lost against CIT Brains Kid with 0:7. Afterwards we had a big technical discussion together and developed an idea on how to make the feet of our Darwins more human-like. After some planing we began to work on a prototyp in the evening. The first results seem to be promising ad we will do further research on this idea.
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Parallely and together with the Fumanoids we gave the visitors a chance to try for themself how difficult it is for a roboter to move. They controlled some fieldplayers of the Fumanoids and tried to score goals against our goalies Glados and Tamara (yes, were obviously training her for every purpose). Thanks to some great movements of our goalies it was not an easy task.

With Tamara we also did some tests with a ball of standard-football-size. Even though the ball was nearly bigger than her, she managed to kick it!

We also did some tests with our printed heads and Atlas.

The pictures of the day:

The teams competing in the World Cup final are now set.
In the first semi-final Team Darwin won against ZJUDancer, in the second semi-final AUTMan won against CITBrainsKid.

Today at 12:00 is the third place match between ZJUDancer and CIT BrainsKid.

The final takes place at 14:00 between Team Darwin and AUTMan, so we should have a new world champion till 15:00.

By the way, Bente has gotten the honour to have been selected for the referee team for the third place match 🙂

It seems as if the Netherlands want to keep our team. After we were mismatched as being a team from the University of Amsterdam before (it was corrected after a mail from us), we found the following on the official site with the results today:

We are honored to be so popular and to get this offer (and Amsterdam probably would be a good city for our team). However, we have to reject this offer as we have to go back to our University of Hamburg.

Kind regards at this point towards the Dutch Nao Team from the University of Amsterdam, which is reading along 🙂

Tomorrow at 12:00 pm we are the first team starting into the Technical Challenges with the Throw-In-Challenge. The challenge is to walk to a ball outside of the field, pick it up and throw it towards a black obstacle (representing another team member).
As a lot of rules for the normal game develop from the challenges, we are using the challenges to already adjust our hard- and software as best as possible.

After the 0:2 against “Hanuman KMUTT” we definitely will not advance to the quarter finals.
Though Tamara did what she can best and shot a goal, only it was in the wrong direction. Afterwards our opponents scored a regular goal.
At the end of this second round robin, we came third in our group but only the first two reach the next round.

We will definitely not up sticks now. On the one hand there is the Throw-In-Challenge at which we are participating, on the other hand now there is even more time for exchange and testgames with other teams.

We lost our match against CIT Brains, the runner-up world champion of the last years. The final result was 0:5, which we think is quite good. We even scored two of the goals, which might in comparison to human football sound bad but means for us: We are capable to score good goals. As both goals have the same color since this world cup and we could not finish the corresponding localisation yet, it might be forgivable sometimes not to know towards which goal we are playing.

Our Goalie Glados has recognized several balls quite good and defended accordingly. Even the multiple jumping for defending, standing up and repositioning did work relatively well.

In the heat of the moment we only recognised afterwards, that the dutch queen literally has looked over our shoulders. At 16:35 you can also see her going through our livestream with an appendage of officials and journalists. Unfortunately she came just at half-time and missed the best. After our game Jessica used her local knowledge in the hall to position herself ahead of the professionals and got a good picture of the queen as she was given a dinosaur robot (at the playground where Tamara was sitting just a little bit before).

We have been working hard for the last 3 hours and are preparing for our next 2 matches, which are still upcoming for us.
For one there ist at 12:00 the game against the “CIT Brains Kid” and at 15:00 a game against “Hanuman KMUTT”.

The CIT Brains are one of the favorites, so it will definitely be an interesting match.