Still very tired from participating at  the GermanOpen last week, a part of our team is already on their way to Teheran where the IranOpen will take place. Next to some teams from the iran, the Fumanoids and Bold Hearts will also be there and give us the possibility for an exciting rematch. How well we can report about the tournament is not entirely clear by now, but we hope we can at least give you some small updates from time to time.

The long awaited new member has arrived just in time for the crucial phase of the season. From now on Fiona will be joining the Hamburg Bit-Bots. Now she has to show her power in the final training camp if she wants to score a place in the starting formation at the GermanOpen. This could be bad news for the lastly disease-ridden Atlas. However there are also unconfirmed rumors, that Atlas is working hard on a comeback as a goalkeeper.

But even if Fiona should not join the starting formation, the management will keep an eye on her and her play after half-time break at the latest.
Regardless of the potential tension, we are very happy about her arrival and keep our fingers crossed for a quick success.

After a thrilling final match with a lot of chances for both teams Team Darwin from the USA won 7:4 against AUTMan from the Iran. Congratulation.

Just now the 3rd place match has ended. With 5:1 the ZJUDancer from China have won against the CIT Brains Kid from Japan.

Yesterday it was the eighth day here in Eindhoven and the long days slowly undermine our strength. Nevertheless we were active in development and exchange with other teams.

At the quarterfinal we kept our fingers crossed for the Fumanoids – unfortunately unsuccessfull as they lost against CIT Brains Kid with 0:7. Afterwards we had a big technical discussion together and developed an idea on how to make the feet of our Darwins more human-like. After some planing we began to work on a prototyp in the evening. The first results seem to be promising ad we will do further research on this idea.
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Parallely and together with the Fumanoids we gave the visitors a chance to try for themself how difficult it is for a roboter to move. They controlled some fieldplayers of the Fumanoids and tried to score goals against our goalies Glados and Tamara (yes, were obviously training her for every purpose). Thanks to some great movements of our goalies it was not an easy task.

With Tamara we also did some tests with a ball of standard-football-size. Even though the ball was nearly bigger than her, she managed to kick it!

We also did some tests with our printed heads and Atlas.

The pictures of the day:

The “ZJU Dancer” from China play against the “CIT Brains” from Japan to reach the third place at the RoboCup2013.

The livestream will start shortly before the match and is about one minute delayed:

Saturday was also the day where the technical challenges took place.
The TC are about mastering situations that usually don’t appear in regular gaming right now but are wished to be observed during future competitions. To encourage the teams to develop these new techniques additional points are granted for the teams who manage to beat the challenges.

The Teams could attempt the following TC:

• The Throw-In where a ball is to be found, picked up, and thrown over the head as close as possible to a black pylon
• The Dribbling, where a ball has to be manoeuvred around some obstacles in order to score a ball.
• The High-Kick, where the goal is to get a ball as high as possible above the goal-line.
• And the Double-Pass, where two robots have to pass the ball in a certain succession around pylons.

The difficulty for the robots is not to be underestimated and as a result only very few teams managed to beat some of the challenges. During the Throw-In and High-Kick it was really hard to find the correct position around the ball. Especially hard seemed to be the Dribbling, as almost never the route through the obstacles was found.