This morning we stormed punctually the exhibition hall and engrossed a table directly at the field and corridor. Prompt we set up our laptops and monitors and covered our ambience with a meshwork of electric, network and monitor cable. Meanwhile the Word-Wide-Web is also available to us more or less regularly, thanks to a fast placed wire straight through the hall.

Also intranet with an own git-server and documentation, as well as a connection to the robots were quickly set up, to prevent usually very unstable global network.

When the day draws to a close, we slowly engross the whole rest of our table, after it was clear, that no other team needs the space. Our working conditions are as good as they could be in an exhibition hall.

Just now (1 am) the last one finishing their programming work and even the homepage article is as good as done.
Tomorrow we will get up at 7 am and prepare for the competition.

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.

The first game has preliminary ended, the score so far is 0:0 and the match will be decided through a penalty shoot-out this evening (Mexican local time). We are very happy about this temporary result against a very strong opponent, the FUmanoids from Berlin (http://www.fumanoids.de).

The RoboCup2012 released its first video. At 0:57 you can see two members of our team 🙂

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.

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.