The “ZJU Dancer” from China play against the “CIT Brains” from Japan to reach the third place at the RoboCup2013.

The livestream will start shortly before the match and is about one minute delayed:

Saturday was also the day where the technical challenges took place.
The TC are about mastering situations that usually don’t appear in regular gaming right now but are wished to be observed during future competitions. To encourage the teams to develop these new techniques additional points are granted for the teams who manage to beat the challenges.

The Teams could attempt the following TC:

• The Throw-In where a ball is to be found, picked up, and thrown over the head as close as possible to a black pylon
• The Dribbling, where a ball has to be manoeuvred around some obstacles in order to score a ball.
• The High-Kick, where the goal is to get a ball as high as possible above the goal-line.
• And the Double-Pass, where two robots have to pass the ball in a certain succession around pylons.

The difficulty for the robots is not to be underestimated and as a result only very few teams managed to beat some of the challenges. During the Throw-In and High-Kick it was really hard to find the correct position around the ball. Especially hard seemed to be the Dribbling, as almost never the route through the obstacles was found.

The teams competing in the World Cup final are now set.
In the first semi-final Team Darwin won against ZJUDancer, in the second semi-final AUTMan won against CITBrainsKid.

Today at 12:00 is the third place match between ZJUDancer and CIT BrainsKid.

The final takes place at 14:00 between Team Darwin and AUTMan, so we should have a new world champion till 15:00.

By the way, Bente has gotten the honour to have been selected for the referee team for the third place match 🙂

It seems as if the Netherlands want to keep our team. After we were mismatched as being a team from the University of Amsterdam before (it was corrected after a mail from us), we found the following on the official site with the results today:

We are honored to be so popular and to get this offer (and Amsterdam probably would be a good city for our team). However, we have to reject this offer as we have to go back to our University of Hamburg.

Kind regards at this point towards the Dutch Nao Team from the University of Amsterdam, which is reading along 🙂

As requested: Here are the results of the quarter-finals.

Team Darwin	vs	MRL-HSL	8	:	‘2
EROS	vs.	AUTMan	1	:	3
ZJUDancer	vs.	Hanuman KMUTT	6	:	1
Berlin United – FUmanoids	vs.	CIT Brains Kid	0	:	7

You will find official results at www.robocup-2013.org/humanoid-kid-size-results – however we are faster with the quarter-final results.

Again a eventful day reached its end.
Due to exhaustion (many long days for us) we must present you the daily report a little delayed.

While the visitors anticipated the arrival of the Queen of the Netherlands, we where already busy making our preperations for our first game of the day. She arrived at the second of our halftime break and was able to observe us while we where servicing our robots for the next half. It did not help us though. Although we reached a third place in our group and did quite well against the former years runner-up we did not reach the quarter final. At least our new calibration-carpet did prove to be a valuable instrument in our gaming perperations.

For now this means, we are going to work on the technical challenge and keep our fingers crossed for the Fumanoids from Berlin, who are the last German team in the end-round.

As a test run for the comming seasons, where we are going to have a bigger field and more players, we made a 5 vs. 5 game on a big-field. Each participating team donated one of their robots for that cause. We had the honour to provide Glados as a goalie for team magenta. To our joy Glados did really well and showed some great parrys. Only one ball did pass him, and the game resulted in a 1:1

RoboCup is more than just soccer playing robots. For example there is the robocup@home, where it is all about domestic service robots who have to fetch various objects and follow certain humans. We did look around there as well today.

Between 9 am and pm there are a lot of visitors in the hall, interested watching the games and preperations.
But how will the teams stay motivated in the 2 hours the visitors have to leave the hall, while the teams are still working?
The simple solution: Cheering robotic fans on a tribune, built by the human visitors themselves during the daytime.

Tomorrow at 12:00 pm we are the first team starting into the Technical Challenges with the Throw-In-Challenge. The challenge is to walk to a ball outside of the field, pick it up and throw it towards a black obstacle (representing another team member).
As a lot of rules for the normal game develop from the challenges, we are using the challenges to already adjust our hard- and software as best as possible.

After the 0:2 against “Hanuman KMUTT” we definitely will not advance to the quarter finals.
Though Tamara did what she can best and shot a goal, only it was in the wrong direction. Afterwards our opponents scored a regular goal.
At the end of this second round robin, we came third in our group but only the first two reach the next round.

We will definitely not up sticks now. On the one hand there is the Throw-In-Challenge at which we are participating, on the other hand now there is even more time for exchange and testgames with other teams.

We lost our match against CIT Brains, the runner-up world champion of the last years. The final result was 0:5, which we think is quite good. We even scored two of the goals, which might in comparison to human football sound bad but means for us: We are capable to score good goals. As both goals have the same color since this world cup and we could not finish the corresponding localisation yet, it might be forgivable sometimes not to know towards which goal we are playing.

Our Goalie Glados has recognized several balls quite good and defended accordingly. Even the multiple jumping for defending, standing up and repositioning did work relatively well.

In the heat of the moment we only recognised afterwards, that the dutch queen literally has looked over our shoulders. At 16:35 you can also see her going through our livestream with an appendage of officials and journalists. Unfortunately she came just at half-time and missed the best. After our game Jessica used her local knowledge in the hall to position herself ahead of the professionals and got a good picture of the queen as she was given a dinosaur robot (at the playground where Tamara was sitting just a little bit before).