Now it is set: We were kicked out by the runner-ups of this world championships! The Bold Hearts lost their final match with 2:3 agains CIT Brains. Congratualations again to the Bold Hearts, we cheered for them during all matches after the intermediate round. The other game that we lost during this competition was against team Eros which made it to the fourth place today. So we had really bad luck in the drawing this time and leaving the tournament that early is not at all a shame.

We spend the last regular competition day with watching the final games, recording some test pictures on the field and tidying up our table. In the evening we first went to the award ceremony and then to the banquet. The latter was a bit chaotic and not even the salad appeared to be vegetarian, but we had great fun and used the time talking to other teams. Tomorrow the symposium will take place and it is the first time we will participate. We are really looking forward to a last day of serious RoboCup discussions.

Another thing that was confirmed today and that we do not want to hold back is the venue for next year: RoboCup 2015 will take place in Hefei, China! And in 2016 the RoboCup will come to Germany again as the Trustees accepted the application of Leipzig. We are pleased about both decisions 🙂

As each year, the traditional league picture has been taken.
First the picture of all the robots:

And then the picture of all team members (thanks to Sean Luke from the Robo Patriots for the permission to use his photo):

At the World Cup, there are often demo matches with mixed teams arranged. We united with the Bold Hearts to play against the team Rhoban Football Club from France. We set a goalkeeper, a defender and a fielder, the Bold Hearts set two additional fielders. The french team placed only three robots. The match startet with an excellent kick-off
by Tamara from our team, which rolled in front of the opposite goal. In the following it appeared that the communication between robots from different teams isn’t perfect by now. There were not only arrangement problems between the three fielders but also with the goalkeeper. The former made all three field players fight for the ball against each other, the second made our robots play on their own goal. In the end Rhoban Football Club won with 2:3 with two out of three goals against us were shot by our own robots, the third one was prepared by them. To execute our goalkeeper we have to say that one goal was shot behind his back so he had no chance to defend it.

The match was not only a great fun for the teams but also for the audience. It appeared that a lot work is still necessary in the field of common team communication to play in serious mixed teams. We will use the reamining time here in Brazil to continue developing an architecture for that together with other teams.

Next our Technical Challenge will take place. We will participate in the synthetic turf challenge (which was suggested by our team last year). In this challenge our robot needs to cross a synthetic turf as quickly as possible. In addition we will try the throw-in challenge. The new hands which were originally developed for the new GOAL robot, proved to be not optimal for the small Darwins, but we tried our best to teach Wheatly throwing. Now he just needs to give proof of that during the technical challenge!

After we lost our game in the intermediate round against the Bold Hearts, we started to prepare for the technical challenges. Additionally we had time to look around in the hall. The Major and the Junior leagues are in separated halls. The hall for the junior competitions is a closed building and cooled down a bit too much. The hall for the major competitions is not that closed. Due to much air exchange, it’s nearly as warm as
outside. And this is pretty hot and wet here in Brazil. Therefore, all of the teams have free access to drinking water. Furthermore there are cooled meeting rooms in the team area. Mostly they are used for the official meetings, but the teams can also block them for their meetings. But the best arrangement on this Word Championship are the hammocks to relax in. It’s much more comfortable to sleep in there than laying down in a hidden corner of the hall.

As it always happens on major competitions, there are some things not working properly. Quiet often we have
trouble with the internet connection. Yesterday was the first day we were able to use the official wired connection. The days before we plugged a very long cable through the hall. Finally we used the uplink of the Hulks. The Hulks are the standard platform league team using NAO robots, from the TU Hamburg Harburg. Meanwhile, there are still problems with the internet connection, but the wireless on the fields is astonishingly reliable (at least for us) thanks to the members of the technical committee collecting the team WLAN routers, which are used illegally. In the competition area, there are so many official wireless connections, so it’s strictly forbidden, to set up an own wireless. Unfortunately we don’t have a storage rack for our hardware stuff as it was promised in Eindhoven last year. Due to that, there is always very much stuff on our small team table. Luckily our table is placed directly at on of the four fields and close to the visitors area. So, we have many opportunities to talk to visitors. Additionally our robots are a very famous photo motive!

We needs first getting used to having a high presence of policeman additionally to many very helpful volunteers in the competition hall. A lot heavily armed policeman are patrolling especially in the evening after the audience left the venue. There are even more outside at the parking area and at the entrances. However, this seems to be common, because on our way back to the hotel we used to see police at the beach or sidewalk.

We allowed our robots to relax from the stresses and strains of the last days. They took some pictures of themselves about what they experienced in the hall and we will hand them in during the next days. Most of the time they were diligent as always watching other robots playing to learn from their tactics.

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