1:2 against the Bold Hearts

The Bold Hearts had the better team and beat us 1:2.
Again there were some critical situations with possibilities of own goals
but both teams were lucky to be spared from this event.

In case of the Bold hearts though it was only because of a controversial referee decision, who declared an “illegal defence” just in the moment when the robot shot the ball into his own goal. So the game could very easily have ended with a draw.
Even though this decision was not according to the rules, it is the referee who has the final say and we accept this decision (especially as own goals are really terrible and the Bold Hearts scored more regular goals than we did).

Our goal scorer again was Tamara, who already scored in Magdeburg and in the first round robin. Of course Tamara is also our youngest robot and accordingly fit concerning the joints. Now she is proudly wearing (besides a new bow in the hair) two badges of silver tape – one for each World Cup goal.

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And another day of RoboCup has begone…

By the time almost all members of our team have a sore throat, thus first some fennel-tea with honey for the start of the day.

At a traffic light on our way here we where spontaneously blessed by a passing stranger.
It might be the catholic scout bus we are driving around here.

But maybe it is a good sign for our upcoming game.

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Netherlands: Day 5

Overall a good day. Our hardware is fully functional and we won our first round robin match. Though we did not implement new world changing modifications on our robots today, we got the software to a stable status so that fails are barely happening. If you want to view our match, you can find the recording of the live stream in our
Youtube-Chanel.

Now we are looking forward to our game against the Bold Hearts tomorrow morning, which has been rescheduled forwards to 9:30.

In the afternoon we went with Tamara to the “Robot playground” – which for some unknown reason seems to have been built for human children. However, Tamara still had some fun on the snuggle lawn petting some robot dinosaurs.

Suspense and some laughs were gotten this evening through the Berliners with their new “Humanoid Plattform” and the suggestion to establish a new league.
The special thing: The hardware in this league is – due to a lack of perfect humanlike robots – substituted through real humans. Each player gets belt on a computer with image recognition and behaviour modul including a webcam on the head. The autonomous working software gives the human then instructions like “turn left”, “shoot”, “go forward”. This means a test of robot behaviour in realistic circumstances without the need for working and existing hardware (you only need to put the equipment on arbitrary people from the side of the playing fields).

3 members of our team spontaneously volunteered as hardware and were instructed by the software to move on the playing field.
Of the people playing, no one was able to do a noteworthy action, besides some funny collisions and pirouettes. Later there was a robot of the teen-sized league put on the field which dribbled the ball competently through the human players and scored a goal.

The inital costs for 11 human players are only 5000€. This would establish an interesting hybrid between the simulation league and real robotics. With advantages of both worlds (and disadvantages from a third), that gives the spectators a high entertainment value (that unfortunately you do not have so much in our league).

So if it would happen by chance that someone sponsors us this equipment, it would be well worth a thought to port our software to the human.

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Game #1 won

YAY! We did it!

Our first regular goal, our first worldcup-goal and our first regular victory in a game.

During the first half we where a little out of luck, the opponents succeeded in scoring a goal against us – our counterstrike was near, but we only got close. The second half was way better. Tamara started from the kick off, and brought the ball with a few “aimed” kicks to the enemy goal. Exactly as planned, which is a rather seldom situation to observe at the RoboCup.
Shortly after this, the enemy fieldie took the initiative again. He saw the ball, positioned himself not to miss the goal post, and kicked – directly into his own goal.

That is how our Game ended – with a 2:1 score for our team – and we have all reason to be happy.
To be honest, the referee decisions where to our advantage. Especially the repositioning of the ball was sometimes quite beneficial for our chances to score.

What makes us especially proud: The game ended without any notable hardware faults. No camera “lost” at all. The difficult soldering work in advance was worth the effort.

Tomorrow at 10:00 9:30 am we are going to play against our neighbours on the next seat, the Bold Hearts from Great Britain.
Maybe we should be careful from now on with the coffee they are offering 🙂

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No Plug, No Problem

Since long we are plagued with problems at the JST-Connectors of our cameras. As we did not manage to construct high-quality spare cables for them we now started to solder them directly to the board.
No plug, no problem.

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The first match of our league

Just now was the kickoff for the first match of the kid-size humanoid league: Team Darwin against the falcons. Both teams are using Darwins, Team Darwin immediately gained the lead and scored 2 goals.

It seems they also have difficulties with the kidnapped robot problem which lead to them scoring an own goal (they did not even use a goalie)

As the internet fittingly failed while I was finishing this article, I can tell you now the final result: 7:1 for Team Darwin (so a total of 8 goals were scored)

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