After getting the assistant referee a black trouser, we started in our kick-out match against the Bold Hearts. Our work last evening about better ignoring the possibility of a goal along the team table paid off and so our robots mostly saw the correct ball and goal. But as the Bold Hearts are running a lot faster than our robots, they were often ahead of us when getting to the ball. On the other hand they had problems with the recognition of their own goal which led to them scoring own goals. Tamara did her best when she reached the ball first and had two very big chances but kicked the ball just outside the goal post into the offside. With the final score of 2:4 we are out of the game schedule and will use the remaining two and a half days to use the competition fields as a perfect testing area for some features that we did not finish in time for the matches, work on Technical Challenges and put more work into the development of our GOAL prototype. And of course we will cheer for the Bold Hearts in their upcoming matches and hope for them to reach the final 😉

We added all the results of the first group stage and the intermediate round on www.bit-bots.de/wm-2014/results-wm-2014-kid-size

After we lost our first match yesterday against EROS with 1:5 and ended in a draw (0:0) in the second group match against the Kudos, we now have to win the intermediate round to advance into the second group stage. That match will be at 9:45 am brazilian time (2:45 pm MESZ) against no other than our friends the Bold Hearts from England. Of course this is unfortunate but the seeding decided this. After the GermanOpen and the IranOpen it will already be the third competition (and continent) at which we have to play against each other. We hope that both teams will be spared from hardware problems and bugs and that only the tactics will decide the winner in the end.

We have Internet again:

https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/gs6oavcrckk3olw7w5jmbw7zfia?hl=de

We are streaming our first match against EROS. Hopefully the connection stays.

https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/g5yfux572rtyqhfmbofz5z5kv4a

This afternoon the World Cup has been opened with a small opening ceremony. A brasilian orchestra accompanied the event.

You can find the game schedules and results for Humanoid-Leauge at bit-bots.de/wm-2014. We try to keep it updated.

Less than 24 hours left till the beginning of the first matches of this years World Cup. And we finally have network too. Yay!

We started at 6:30 – thanks to jet lag and going to bed early – well rested and fresh into the new day. The RoboCup hall will open on Saturday for the two so called setup days and therefore we needed to take the hotel environment for preparation work.

Because of the ongoing rain the team meeting could not take place at the swimming pool but at one of our rooms instead. The wall was quickly converted to a todo board and tasks were distributed. As it is nearly impossible to test vision or behaviour under the hotel conditions, we concentrated besides of these homepage posts on animations (projectable movements).
GOAL, who will hopefully has his first assignment as a goal keeper during this world championship, needs to learn to stand up. In addition we were working on a larger variety of stable shots for the Darwin robots. The behaviour will take the goal information into consideration and therefore a good combination of ball and goal tracking is needed. We managed to prepare a lot, which can be tested in the competition hall tomorrow. Our software is in a very good condition some hours in advance of the tournament for the first time. The behaviour needs to be optimized and tested, but the functionality is all existent. However, we are all excited whether GOAL will be ready until the start of the first game, beeing not only able to stand up but also to defend our goal.

The rooftop of our hotel has a small covered area in which we made our new home. We enjoyed the sight and the climate as well as a productive work atmosphere. Just the power grid caused some difficulties: The ground wire had 60 Volt attached – which makes for example all metal pieces of a laptop beeing energized while the power supply cable is attached and therefore the skin is prickling every time someone touches them. Thats tingly software engineering the Brazilian way 😉

We used the lunch brake not only for a mental cool-down, we also went swimming in the sea and ran riot in the waves. Afterwards we went to work again with twice the motivation we had before. Since the noon the Bodensee-Haie RoboCup team from Gymnasium BZM Markdorf started working next to us on the roof top. The team consists of four boys and a female teacher and they are participating successfully in the Junior Soccer League.

We additionally met the Hulks at the beach.

A small appendix to the Brazilian fauna from the afternoon: On our way to a new supermarket we had to pass a small tarn in which a crocodile was bobbing up and down!

We spend the evening in a small hotel restaurant a few hundred meters to the north of our own hotel. They had a large and heavy buffet which also served vegetarian and gluten free food. On our way back we mad a short loop way to a small market and bought (amongst others) some Cashew nuts.

In the meantime the hotel is crowded with other RoboCup teams. They are sitting in the lobby, on the roof top and an all other public spaces preparing for the next day (this can be also recognized by the vanishing wlan power). We are really looking forward to start testing and meeting other teams in the RoboCup hall tomorrow.

Arrived in our first two hotel rooms we recognized that we only had about an hour left till the begin of the breakfast. We used the time to play together “Green Stories”. Marc and Sheepy emreged as real experts on this field.
Dead on time (as german as possible ;)) we went to the doors of the breakfast halls at half past 6. In there was a breakfast buffet we could not have dreamed of. The term international breakfast correspondends really well: There are cakes, cookies, scrambled eggs, bread, cheese, ham, fruits, yoghurt, … We ate really well till erveryone was satisfied. Afterwards we wanted to explore the beach a bit more. So everyone got “beach ready” and went over the road. The sea was warm and clean so we spend some time in it before we lay down on the beach to dry. After everyone had showered away the salt and the flight, we had our first team meeting at the hotel pool, cooling the feet in the water.

Then we began some work. However, the tiredness took its toll, after all we had been more than 24 hours en route. So we spend the time till 2 pm with differing productivity. The chaos at the real check-in got everyone awake again. Although we only booked single beds, we got some double beds. The communication on how to change that proved difficult. As we expected after our experience in Mexico, nearly no one in the hotel speaks English. And our Portugese is despite Jessicas vocabulary cheat sheet only more or less adeqauate for the grocery. A cleaner was our salvation, as she understands English and with additional help of hands and feet we did successfull communication. We used the alteration time of our rooms to do our grocery shopping. A tourist information with three friendly and very good English speaking women was a great help with finding a supermarket. And we meet a lot of helpfulness at other times as well: At the attempt to change money (which unfortunately was only possible from Real in Euro or Dollar) a child of an employee jumped in as a translator.
The following effort to find a restaurant proved more difficult than expected, as there was no combination of vegetarian and cheap meals findable. Given that we were quite hungry, we finally settles on the other side of the world at McDonalds.

On the way back we did the first big grocery shopping: Water, Bread, cold meat, cheese,… Furthermore we discovered a market where there were a lot of exotic fruits. We bought grapes, bananas and a mango, as well as pepper and limes and received two fruits as a gift, that we had never seen before. Back in the hotel we googled that they were a custard apple and a Caju. Some of the grocery was then eaten on the hotel roof with a view to the sea and the beach promenade. And then finally after a long, long (did I say long?) day, we went to bed, to begin a more productive day on friday at 6:30 a.m after some good sleep.