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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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 🙂

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.

Just now, just in time for Timons lunch break, we were visited by “J.K.” from Robotis (the manufacturer of our robots), who asked about how it goes.

We have spoken a bit about motors, firmware, plastic pieces and the situation with spare parts, and he promised to do his best concerning some of the points. For example if there is a possibility to get the complete documentation about the registers of the Dynamixels.

Additionally we let him take some pictures of us – and in return took our own one.

We got some praise for our work-group logo, which appeals to J.K. and his colleagues. Kind regards to any employee of Robotis who finds his way to our site 🙂

The game schedule has been announced. In the first round robin we are competing in a group with MRL-HSL from Iran and the Bold Hearts from the United Kingdom.

On wednesday it starts with MRL-HSL against the Bold Hearts at 11:30. In the afternoon we have our first game at 15:30, against MRL-HSL. On thursday at 10:00 we are playing against the Bold Hearts.

Finally the technical challenges will take place on saturday from 10:15 till 16:15.