We had our first match against the NUBots from Australia this morning. We were evenly matched, but on field our robots had some troubles, like game-ball recognition, since the game field was very dark and the general lighting conditions weren’t that good either. Furthermore we had to struggle with an unstable WLAN connection with the gamecontroller. Nevertheless we managed to maintain a score of 0:0.

The second match was only an hour later and Maike was chosen for the referee of another game also. This was unfortunate, since we couldn’t improve much meanwhile. At the beginning of the match against Team RoBIU from Israel, Maike wasn’t finished with her job. Furthermore our game was at another game-field again. This resulted in another problem: we had to correct the game-ball recognition again. With the help of a timeout and the half-time break we managed to fix it, so that we were able to play correctly in the second half. This is visualized in the score: In our first half our opponents scored 4 goals, but in the second half only one. So the game end with a score of 0:5.

After that we focused on the upcoming last match against the world cup holders DARwin and the throw-in-challenge, coming up tomorrow noon.
And so a stressful day is drawing to an end.

Here are some pictures for you:

As mentioned before, we had our first match against the Berlin United – FUmanoids ending with a score of 0:0 this at noon. Since there was no winning-team, we had a penalty shootout in the evening to decide this match. So we had all the afternoon to improve the behaviour of our goal scorer and fix some bugs, that occured during the game.
The penalty shootout was very nerve-wracking for both teams and the spectators from the other teams. The first 5 attempts to score a goal weren’t successfully for any team, so the rules dictate that the following attempts were made without a goalkeeper. After 11 additionals attempts and half an hour later, the Berlin-team was lucky and scored a goal. In our team nearly everything failed and we lost with a score of 0:1.

At the end of the day, we celebrated Maikes birthday (in accordance to the German time) with a nice ‘Happy Birthday’ and a cake.

Tomorrow at 14:30, we will continue with a match against the NUBots. Next up: the detailed schedule.

Here is the detailled schedule of the RoboCup 2012.
In the first round, every team plays against their respective groupmembers. The winner of the first place continues to the next group stage. The second-place finisher competes against the third-placed from another group to get on in the tournament.
Our first match in the group G will be against the Berlin United-FUmanoids.

On the first day of RoboCup 2012 we wanted to be first to choose a nice working table, but the orga-team had upset our plans, since they opened up 30 minutes late and already assigned all the places by their own choice. So we were supposed to sit in a far discarded corner, but managed to negotiate a better table for our team later on.

After preparing our new workspace, we went back to the hotel – right around the corner – to have some breakfast.
Thereafter we started programming. Even though it didn’t look well in the afternoon (nothing really worked), we were able to achieve some successes in the evening. We managed to improve our robots image processing in such a way, that the tracking of the game-ball works much faster now, which got us the nice side benefit of an improved behaviour of our goalkeeper and outfield players.