What a day.
We succeeded to advance to the second round robin and also had our first match of this second round.
The draw can be seen as quite satisfying because of the skills of the opposing team, and we had our chances to score too.

Temporarily it was very stressful for us, as our match in the intermediate round went into overtime and penalty shootout, with the following first match of the second round robin starting shortly after this. If we would have had big hardware problems, we would possibly have had a breakdown, but we did not 😉

On the contrary. Due to the kind lending from the Bold Hearts our hardware worked better than ever and we were finally able to idenfy which of our stability problems were because of the Hardware and which were because of the Software. Indeed it is mostly the hardware, only our stand-up animation from lying on the back seems to need big improvements.

Propably we will have a reversed friendly match against the Bold Hearts before the end of the World Cup. Their software on our robots against our software on their robots. If we loose, we can never again complain to them about our worn out hardware, if we win we have all the rights to do it 🙂

Here now as usual the collected pictures of the day:

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Now it has been set that in the Intermediate Round we are competing against Cyberlords La Salle at 1.45 pm.

Overall a good day. Our hardware is fully functional and we won our first round robin match. Though we did not implement new world changing modifications on our robots today, we got the software to a stable status so that fails are barely happening. If you want to view our match, you can find the recording of the live stream in our
Youtube-Chanel.

Now we are looking forward to our game against the Bold Hearts tomorrow morning, which has been rescheduled forwards to 9:30.

In the afternoon we went with Tamara to the “Robot playground” – which for some unknown reason seems to have been built for human children. However, Tamara still had some fun on the snuggle lawn petting some robot dinosaurs.

Suspense and some laughs were gotten this evening through the Berliners with their new “Humanoid Plattform” and the suggestion to establish a new league.
The special thing: The hardware in this league is – due to a lack of perfect humanlike robots – substituted through real humans. Each player gets belt on a computer with image recognition and behaviour modul including a webcam on the head. The autonomous working software gives the human then instructions like “turn left”, “shoot”, “go forward”. This means a test of robot behaviour in realistic circumstances without the need for working and existing hardware (you only need to put the equipment on arbitrary people from the side of the playing fields).

3 members of our team spontaneously volunteered as hardware and were instructed by the software to move on the playing field.
Of the people playing, no one was able to do a noteworthy action, besides some funny collisions and pirouettes. Later there was a robot of the teen-sized league put on the field which dribbled the ball competently through the human players and scored a goal.

The inital costs for 11 human players are only 5000€. This would establish an interesting hybrid between the simulation league and real robotics. With advantages of both worlds (and disadvantages from a third), that gives the spectators a high entertainment value (that unfortunately you do not have so much in our league).

So if it would happen by chance that someone sponsors us this equipment, it would be well worth a thought to port our software to the human.

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Just now, just in time for Timons lunch break, we were visited by “J.K.” from Robotis (the manufacturer of our robots), who asked about how it goes.

We have spoken a bit about motors, firmware, plastic pieces and the situation with spare parts, and he promised to do his best concerning some of the points. For example if there is a possibility to get the complete documentation about the registers of the Dynamixels.

Additionally we let him take some pictures of us – and in return took our own one.

We got some praise for our work-group logo, which appeals to J.K. and his colleagues. Kind regards to any employee of Robotis who finds his way to our site 🙂

The game schedule has been announced. In the first round robin we are competing in a group with MRL-HSL from Iran and the Bold Hearts from the United Kingdom.

On wednesday it starts with MRL-HSL against the Bold Hearts at 11:30. In the afternoon we have our first game at 15:30, against MRL-HSL. On thursday at 10:00 we are playing against the Bold Hearts.

Finally the technical challenges will take place on saturday from 10:15 till 16:15.

The first setup day has gone by and today again quite a lot has happened.

In particular the official game balls have been handed out and – surprisingly for all – its colour is kind of an orange-magenta (so it is quite similar to one of the team colours). This means that we have to adjust our colour calibration, which – at the moment – turns out to be quite time-consuming. But this is what setup days are meant for.

With 8 people and 5 robots it is quite cramped at our table, which is the reason why we went (together with the Fumanoids from Berlin) to the local hardware store and got a clickable shelf for extended storage space. At other tables they might think about german tidiness now.

Sitting directly beside us are the Bold Hearts from Great Britain, who we already know from the German Open. As they came only with 3 people, they did mind our space necessities less than what would be expected of other teams. The Bold Hearts are using the Darwin platform too, which has led to knowledge exchange before.

We were able to put up our big poster at a prominent place in the competition hall, thanks to an official who looked the other way. A great thing about the hall is the fact, that it has no windows at all which will probably mean a constant lighting during the day.

Today went by fast with the testing of our software and servicing of the hardware. The latter drove some workgroup members nearly crazy due to nerve-wracking, fiddly work on the cableconnectors. But at 22:30 a speaker message disturbed the bee hive of robocup teams: “30 minutes left, leave the Hall!” Similar to the opening of the hall they pay great attention to punctuality – and at 23:00 the electricity is shut down in the whole hall.

Now we are back to our accommodation and writing down the experiences of the day – if Martin allows it. Because as soon as he boots his (freshly installed!) Ubuntu, everyone else, except him, ist denied any further access to the WLAN. You’ve got to love technology.

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