Update Iran Open: We are second

Because of the same difference in won matches and goals for and against us, we now share the second place with Berlin United in the Iran Open 2014 competition. The price has been awarded to us in an extensive awards ceremony featuring a member of the parliament of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the vice president of the Islamic Azad University Tehran.

After a live interview on Channel 3 of the national Iranian broadcasting service on Saturday morning, we got two more days to explore the city of Tehran and make friends with the welcoming people living there.

HTWK 0:4 MRL

Unfortunately we lost our last game 0:4 and finish 3rd. Despite losing with such a difference in scored goals it was actually our best game here. MRL played very well and we look forward to meet them again in Brazil.
We will share some pictures later.

HTWK 1:1 Berlin United

We played 1:1 against Berlin United in the closest game of the tournament so far. Next will be against local team MRL at 11:30 CEST.
It's the last game of the Iran Open and will decide on which place we finish, everything from 1st to 3rd is possible.

HTWK 2:0 Dutch Nao Team

We won our 2nd match of the competition with a 2:0 over Dutch Nao Team. To prevent our robots from constantly falling we turned down their walking speed by almost 50%, so they are very slow now. In addition, we had to turn off our signature passing during half-time break, due to the robots failing to adjust themselves repeatedly.

Talking Strategy

We will have our next match against Berlin United tomorrow at 10:00 local time, which is 07:30 CEST.

Impressions from Iran Open

Although only 5 teams take part in our league, the whole event is huge with basically every robocup discipline present. The Iran Open are spread out over several halls and despite of the size, our hosts take good care of us and there are many translators waiting just to take care of our needs.

The exhibition hall we are situated in

On the way to score against MRL

Ex-president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani with company

Robocup Iran Open 2014 has started!

Today we played our first game of the Iran Open this year in which we defeated DAInamite from Berlin 1:0. Earlier, we had a test against local team MRL. Under the eyes of ex-president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani we lost 1:3. We still have some testing to do, as the current rug and light-situation make it very difficult for our robots to play.

Impressions after our last game at the GermanOpen 2014

Receiving our Price

Our robots also love to celebrate

Our team foto of this year

A good part of all SPL teams participating at the German Open 2014

Iran Open 2014: Arrival

After 17 hours of travelling we finally arrived at the Imam Khomeini Airport, Tehran at 11:15 pm local time. Today, after some organizational complications, we arrived at the international Exhibition Area in Tehran, where the Iranian Open 2014 takes place. We had a very warm welcome and are now setting up our robots for the competition. The competition officially starts on Wednesday, so we have two more days for setting up the robots and checking out the competition's surroundings.

German Open 2014, 2nd Place

We lost 1:4 in the finals, a result with which we are very happy, as it means an improvement in comparison to last year.
The game started very much in favor of B-Human, as we quickly fell behind one goal. Some missed opportunities later we went into half-time with 0:3.
Then we had a moment of shock: Our calibration settings for the camera got deleted by accident. Panicking, we prepared our calibration and called a time-out. 4 minutes of calibration (see picture) was enough and the 2nd half ended with a comforting 1:1

Some of us will fly to Teheran for the Iran Open tomorrow, so we will keep the blog updated for a while.

Finals!!!

We made it to the finals with a 4:1 victory over MRL. The game was very intense and one of our robots overheated during first half, causing lots of stress for us.
Finals will be at 15:00 against B-Human, we hope for a great game!

Drop-In Challenge Part 4

For the last Drop-In Challenge game we switched our strategy back to playing actively with the hope to win the game. Unfortunately our striker missed the goal twice and the referee ended the game 5 seconds before we would have scored another goal. This caused our team to lose 2:4, succumbing to the distance shots from B-Human and MRL.
We will give an update on the final standings and will start preparing for the semi-final at 11:30 now.

Round Robin over

The last game of round robin ended with an exciting 1:1 draw, the local audience seemed pleased.

We will be back early tomorrow to report about the last Drop-In Match and the remaining playoffs.

HTWK 6:0 RoboEireann

Recently we finished our last game of round robin with a 6:0 victory over RoboEireann, thusly advancing to the semi-finals as first. Apart from a hardware failure almost everything worked as we hoped it would resulting in our best game of the tournament so far.

Semi-finals will kick off with our game tomorrow at 11:30 CEST, most likely against MRL from Teheran.

Group stage decider at 13:00 CEST

At 1pm we will face RoboEireann. There it will be decided who will leave our group in first place. We definitely have to win this to avoid meeting B-Human in the semi-finals. We still have some testing to do, but are confident to be ready in time.

In other news: We were the 2nd best rated team in todays Drop-In Challenge, overall we are still 4th.

Drop-In Challenge Part 3

The third game of the Drop-In Challenge is over. Our robot successfully held his position and watched our teammates defeat the opponents. Final score was 4:3. We will keep you updated on how this will affect the ratings.

HTWK 4:2 HULKs

We also won our 2nd game of today, this time it was 4:2. While the team from Hamburg was unable to field any robots due to unfinished communication settings, we suffered from hardware problems and some bugs in the code.
Hopefully Aldebaran will be able to fix some of our robots soon

Result Page

You can find results and upcoming games here: German Open 2014

Watching the Competition

MRL from Teheran, Iran just gave the defending champions, B-Human, a hard time. B-Human won 3:1, but the tournament turns out to be quite exciting.

Meanwhile the results for the 2nd Drop-In Challenge are now online. Our new strategy of not doing anything worked very well and now we are 4th overall with 2 more games to play.

HTWK 4:1 Bembelbots

We just finished our first game of the German Open 2014 where we faced off against the Bembelbots. We won 4:1, although the WLan didn't work during 2nd half.

Drop-In Challenge Part 2

We finished last in the Drop-In Challenge yesterday albeit we scored most of the goals. We are quite unhappy with the rules, seeing a good performance isn't rewarded.
Todays challenge started off the same with our robot managing to dribble the ball into the opponent goal a few seconds after kickoff. Adding a perfect pass to the B-Human player, we also assisted the 2nd goal of our team. With 2 own goals (1 by us), the half-time score was 2:2.

For 2nd half we applied some changes, resulting in our bot playing completely passive, thus not being punished by the rules. Yet again someone scored an own goal, so overall we lost 2:3.

Drop-In Challenge

The first Drop-In Challenge just finished with a 4:2 victory for the team including our robot.
This time we didn't do everything ourselves which gave B-Human and Nao-Devils the chance to score one goal each. The result of our robot would have been 3:1 otherwise

During halftime we also fixed a bug causing our players to switch sides. We are hopeful to score less own-goals in the next matches.

Drop-In Challenge

In 30 minutes we will participate in the Drop-In Challenge. Every team will have one robot started with their own code, resulting in a 4vs4. A few minutes ago we already had a first test with 6 out of the 8 teams playing.
The HTWK robot outplayed everyone else and scored 2 goals for the correct team and 1 for our opponents. Even the B-Human bot in the same team was stunned by our performance.

Scheduling Information

The match schedules for the group stage are online now. We will face the Bembelbots from Frankfurt, HULKS from Hamburg and RoboEireann from Maynooth, Ireland. Our first game will be against our friends, the Bembelbots, tomorrow at 10 am. Wish us luck!

Referee Meeting

Right now there is a referee meeting going on to get everyone up to date regarding the rules.

Preparation status

We're back at the site for the 2nd preparation day. Yesterday we were able to fix some major bugs and to simulate a kickoff with success, which is an important sign that we are good to go.

For today we plan to implement some new stuff to further improve our gameplay. In addition, some of our robots will be sent in to get repaired.

German Open 2014

We just arrived in Magdeburg where the German Open takes place this year.

The official games will start on Thursday, but we will have some test matches in the meantime. We are looking forward to have a great time and, of course, to do our best.