Landing at our final destination...

We landed on a small airport in Brazil framed by fields, a short landing strip and a small airport building. To his delight, Tobias was informed that his luggage was not left behind in Frankfurt and was routed here. We found his bag nearby and had everything to start our transfer to the hotel.

How does a plane...

... full of RoboCup participants look like? Very tired,  actually ;-) Nearly every single passenger in our flight from Sao Paulo to our final destination was a RoboCup participant. This resulted in a lot of really tired faces taking on the last part of their long journey but also a few very interesting conversations.

Landing in Sao Paulo...

We've landed on time in Sao Paulo. We met a lot of familiar faces on our flight: a few members of  B-Human and the WF Wolves. Shortly after arrival we noticed Tobias luggage was missing and we hope to get more information about it at our hotel later. We are waiting for our connection flight right now. We already past the security screening and we have three hours to about the coming days.

Our other team members should have landed at 2am and we hope they reached the hotel by now. They can't check in yet because earliest check in time is 3pm. It's currently 8am here. So we hope the guys are enjoying the beach and ocean right now ;-) 

We're leaving the country...

Bye guys. Everything went fine. We got our tickets, we have our luggage checked in and we are past security. Currently we are preparing to board the plane. We will need 20 hours to arrive at our hotel. Looking forward to hear from you soon guys.

Elvis left the building...

It's time, we're leaving Leipzig via train and start one of our longest journeys so far. Our next stop will be Frankfurt Airport.

We start this journey with the combined effort the team invested in our firmware over the last year. Also we're seeing forward to see what the other teams have accomplished and how they will impress us. What challenges we will face in the next two weeks? ... We don't know yet, but we are eager to find out.

Luggage and robots

With three team members already on the way to Brazil, the last of us are checking every piece of equipment and are preparing our cabin luggage. We will start at 3pm taking the train to Frankfurt Airport and fly with a stopover in Sao Paulo to our final destination João Pessoa. We're landing at 3pm on Friday and have the rest of the day to acclimate and to cure our jet lag.

Preparations for the RoboCup 2014

We prepared for the RoboCup by attending the local RoBOWs. These events are more or less open meetups for RoboCup teams. We played a few test games, shared the newest research and were happy to have the opportunity to meet the other teams.

We also participated in the "Lange Nacht der Spiele" (long gaming night) at the HTWK and felt honoured to be invited to the "Lange Nacht der Wissenschaft" (long night of science). There we joined a mini RoboCup with four other teams. At both events we had a huge audience and had a lot fun.

A journey begins...

The RoboCup 2014 will start at the 19th of July. We will have a few setup days before the tournament begins.

Yesterday Thomas and Tobias arrived in Leipzig and began integrating the new subsystems into the firmware. We will have some exciting days before Thursday  when we will fly from Frankfurt to João Pessoa.

The Naos are also excited to visit Brazil. A few Naos can not walk right now, but they are so excited anyways so we have to restrain them ;-)

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.