It’s Day 4 now at home in Hamburg too. The 7 hour time offset makes it possible for the on-site team to commit the current code with tasks in the evening and let it be worked on overnight from the rest of the team in Hamburg.
Today finally is our first match at 12 o’clock pm (Mexico) and accordingly 7 o’clock pm (Hamburg). The team has made contact a short while ago and is now working parallel on the hoped-for success!
Cross your fingers!!! Our first opponent is a friendly and very successful team from Berlin.

A nice time for us all!!!!

We were busy working the whole day until 11 o’clock pm on programming and testing.
Now our players have a stable walk and the goalkeeper gets (nearly) every ball. For tomorrow (wednesday) it is planned to implement the elaborated behaviour for the outfield players.

Anything else? Oh, yes, we got a cool referee t-shirt.

Today it was time for a bit of sightseeing in the city, so after having a good breakfast (remember our shopping tour from yesterday?) we went to the metro and used it to get to the Bosque de Chapultepec, a 4 km² large park.
There we met an Austrian team from the Junior Rescue League with whom we had a short conversation. Afterwards a rowing boat was rent to explore the Lago Chapultepec. Finally we wanted to visit the castle which stands on top of the hill.
Having arrived there, we had to watch how everyone was allowed to enter the castle free of charge while we as tourists would have had to pay a special entrance fee. Very frustrated we went back to the hotel, which we reached soaked to the skin. Then after having a short lunch we went back to work.

The first day startet with a lot of sleep and some team members getting up late. Even before breakfast the simple hotel room was converted into a lab.
The then following breakfast turned out quite poor, there was fresh orange juice, fried bread and strawberry jam. If you wanted something else, you would have had to buy it.
Afterwards we went into the supermarket which was an adventure in itself, as we had to take out our dictionary at every other product. But as the picture shows, it was something we also mastered.

What turned out much more difficult, was to find an adequate specialised store for electronics which sells an USB-to-Ethernet cable. After searching through the city for an hour we gave up at first, but later successfully found the proper piece in a Mac Store, that not only had the cable (allegedly only for Macusers) but also an in our project interested employee.

After and during this excursion we were busy working and it was already midnight when we all – tired and exhausted – went to bed.

Finally the stress of the preparation is past and the actual World Cup stress can begin.

This morning at 8:30 our robots mounted a plane together with their six-headed team of staff.
At first they went to Amsterdam and from there they flew over the Atlantic Ocean towards Mexico-City where they will be participating at the RoboCup2012 World Cup in the Humanoid Kid-Sized League.

The World Cup is already a success, simply alone to the fact that it got possible for us to participate. The international RoboCup-competition is a unique chance to have a real exchange of experiences with other teams, compare the own skills with those of other teams and learn from each other.
Although the competition itself is not the most important aspect to achieve this, naturally it provides a huge motivation for research and certainly quite a lot of fun for the participants too.
Of course we will try our best to reach a good place, even though this is our first World Cup.

As here is not enough space to individually thank all the people and institutions that have supported us in the last weeks – and the list would inevitably be incomplete, we say an overall thank you to the Department of Informatics at the University of Hamburg whose members and friends have supported us in various ways in the last weeks so that our participation at the World Cup succeeds.

Out of the blue they were there. Three customs officers with a serious look on their faces approached us and took our robots. We were asked to follow them! In a separate room an officer produced a rod and moved it along the robot. Afterwards the beeping machine …

And then we suddenly got a private photo appointment for GLaDOS. After we described the officers the amazing thing we planned to do with the robots we were allowed to take a picture on a seperate X-ray machine.

So this is how GLaDOS looks on a X-ray. You can even see a missing screw if you look closely. Thus it seems as if we have to acquire a X-ray machine too soon 😉

Now quickly written down our website for the customs officers and then on to the Boarding Gate – A39.

First the good news: Suddenly we have all the replacement motors we wished for.
Now the bad news: This is due to the fact that we only have one game-ready robot at the moment.

Originally we had planned to work on the “animations” and on our “walking” today and therefore had met at 10:00 this saturday. But as soon as we realized that we could not boot Atlas, we knew that the day would not be as expected. We do not want to speculate about the exact reason here, but by now we suspect that the mainboard from Atlas does not want to play along anymore. Unfortunately this is the second-worst part that can break on a Darwin, just right after the even more difficult to obtain subcontroller.

All this comes at the most inconvenient time one could imagine: only a few weeks before the World Cup. With 2 of 3 robots it would still be possible to compete against another team, however with only one player we could have the best program and would still not stand a chance.

Of course this is no reason for us to give up! Currently we are feverishly working on the fast acquisition of the required replacements and are confident to get them (with support through the department) in time for the World Cup.