Coverage of the 2006 WorldCup
On this topic you will be able to follow our team's way to the World Cup in Bremen, Germany. We will try to keep you updated with all what is happening at the event. You can also follow the event live through the video stream which we have set up at our table, by clicking here.
Our schedule looks like the following (note that all the times are in local time, GMT+1):
| Day |
Time |
Opponent |
Result |
| Wednesday |
at 14:00 |
vs. Vienna Cubes (Austria) |
0-1 |
| Thursday |
at 11:30 |
vs. CMDragons (USA) |
0-10 |
| Friday |
at 12:00 |
vs. Strive |
3-0 |
| |
at 16:30 |
vs. Revenger |
3-1 |
Round Robin (Second round)
| Day |
Time |
Opponent |
Result |
| Saturday |
at 09:00 |
vs. Field Rangers (Singapore) |
0-10 |
Day-by-day
Saturday 17.06.2006
Bad news and I guess I don't have to tell you all what the bad news is about (I guess too many of you forgot to say that prayer for us last night). Field Rangers totally wiped the floor with our robots but still you can't find any sad faces in our team. Our robot was built from scratch in 2 months and quite frankly, we didn't even expect to go this far. But as mentioned earlier, we have great plans for the next years RoboCup. We will keep you updated as the next years model will grow in to the lean, mean, soccerplaying machine that we intend it to be and as soon as we get back to Finland, the live video-feed will be put back online so that you all can follow the progress.
Last but not the least, we would like to thank you all for following our way to the 2006 WorldCup and we all wish that you will be just as good supporters as you have been during the event. The charts of unique visitors for the website has shot through the roof, going from ~20 visits per day to over 150(!) and from all over the world. The number of pageviews went up from ~50 to 500+ per day. So a big thanks to all of you!
Result: 12th in the RoboCup 2006
Friday 16.06.2006
Today we finally won our first game. We played against Strive who apparently had some software problems which led to us getting a couple of penalty kicks and one of these led to a goal.. Now if we win against Revenger later tonight, we are on to the next round and as long as the robots doesn't suddenly break down, we have a great chance of winning (against Revenger that is).
EDIT: We won! We are now on to the next round and will face Field Rangers in playoffs. This basically means that if we lose this game, we are eliminated but if we actually win the game, we are in the quarter-final (currently we are in the top 12). So before you all go to bed tonight, say a prayer for our team and let's hope that tomorrow will bring a lot of joy!
Thursday 15.06.2006
This morning we had to face one of the best teams in the small-size league, CMDragons from the US. We were quite sure that we had no chance but we were still eager to play the game. The rules say that the maximum amount of goals that a team can score is 10 and then the match is over, and the CMDragons managed to reach that limit in 11 minutes. Now don't think that our robots didn't play well, we were all actually really proud of their performance because they performed far better than yesterday. We might have had a chance at scoring some goals in yesterdays game if they would have performed this well. But todays game was great, the people running the CMDragons are good sports and we have a lot to learn from them about the strategies and we might even get some ideas about the next years robot-model, but until next year we can just face the facts that they are the better team.
Wednesday 14.06.2006
Today we have one good and one bad news but I'll start off with some common things. We started off early from the hotel to do the final adjustments for todays game. Sadly enough, we actually only had time to test our strategies and robots for 8 minutes before our first game. This was due to the fact that we still had quite some things to twek and repair on the robots before we could put them to use and in addition to this, the hour before the game when we were to do all the testing, there was other teams which used the frequencies quite near the ones we were able to use and therefor we had no chance to test it any longer than those 8 poor minutes.
Now to the bad news, we lost our first game, zero to one (0-1) against Vienna Cubes from Austria. The good news is that our team actually performed quite well even though we haven't had no time for testing the strategies. The robots performance suprized almost all of us, so there's still a small light at the end of the tunnel, let's just hope we can reach that far.
Today a lot of great ideas for next years model has been born. We already have several guidelines set and ideas to be turned into reality. Let's just hope that we will get enough support for next year to fulfill all our ideas and build a robot which will stun all our competitors by it's performance. But this is all for next year, we are now keeping focus on fighting hard in this years event to make it to the top three..
Tuesday 13.06.2006
Due to a quite stressful start of the event, we haven't had the chance to write any coverage of the event before just now, but let's start at the beginning. It started out with us having the robots done at 03:50 on Monday morning and packed it into the boxes at 04:00 (by knowing the clock, one can easily see that we didn't have no time for testing the robots or strategies) because we had to be at the airport at 05:00. The journey to Germany went quite fine, except that one of our boxes somehow got lost in transit and arrived just 10 minutes ago. This resulted in that we haven't had no soldering-irons, which we on a side note would had good use for at several occations. As soon as we got to Bremen we started setting up the cameras and started callibrating the field. Due to the fact that we've only had 2 months to finish our robots and that we also built a whole new one, including new software for it, it's still been a lot of things to do here in Bremen.
Our chip-kick model is now working as it should, but there's still some tweaking underway with the spinner-model. Both models just got measured by the committé who made sure that none of the teams would break the rules set for the competition and thankfully the spinner-model passed without any remarks and the housing for the chip-kick model only had to be adjusted by a couple of millimeters. This gives us more time to put on the strategies and the software part. We will keep you updated as the event goes on.. Keep your fingers crossed for us.
Pictures from the event can be found in the gallery here