RoboCup: The second day

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We continue our work on the robot on this day as well. Since the early morning hours, our team has been busy assembling the robots, soldering boards, and writing numerous lines of code for our AI. Robots constantly shuttle between the electronics and firmware teams, the sound of the mechanical team’s hand-held Dremel tool resonates throughout the entire floor, as does the continuous playing of “Never Gonna Give You Up” from the firmware room.

To give the team a little break, we have scheduled a journal club at 1:00 p.m., where all of our team members gather to discuss and determine the best publications from other teams. This is one of the tasks we must undertake as a team, as the “Best Paper Award” is awarded based on the votes of all teams. After several more hours of work, we finally transitioned to the relaxing part of the evening: cooking together and unwinding with a bottle of French wine.

It was quite fitting that we cooked pasta – after all, our robot generation is named “Pasta” as well. Thus, dinner was an homage to our metallic midfielder No. 9 – “Fussilli.”

Having been nourished, we are eagerly looking forward to tomorrow when we will finally enter the exhebition hall, and we hope to conduct some tests with our robots on the actual playing field.

Welcome to Bordeaux!

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In two days, the time has finally come: RoboCup 2023 in Bordeaux begins! But before we can really get started, the first task is to arrive properly.

And this is not so easy: After an exhausting and sometimes nerve-wracking train journey of 22 hours, accompanied by some very last-minute changes in plans from our beloved friend, Deutsche Bahn, we finally arrive at our hotel on Saturday evening. The journey and our associated emotions can be summarized very vividly with the following image:

After unloading all the suitcases in the hotel rooms, it’s time to relax and reflect on the day. The numerous French restaurants make the decision for dinner not easy, but eventually, everyone finds something delicious to eat. Our robots also enjoyed a good glass of “Grand Vin de Bordeaux,” and so the day ends in a relaxed manner.

Refreshed and fueled up, the next day we start by organizing our tools and doing some initial work on the robot. The goal is to have the entire fleet of robots ready for action by Monday evening, one day before we are allowed to enter the convention hall. Whether we succeed or not, you will find out soon.

Review Performance on Red Square

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Together with many other university groups from the technical faculty, we were once again able to draw attention to our activities and projects on Red Square at the beginning of this summer semester and introduce ourselves to potential new members. In addition to our stand, for example, the Formula student team High Octanes with one of their racing cars, Evolonic with their autonomous flying drone and many other groups such as the TechFak garden, the student council, … were on site.

A special feature of our appearance was the opportunity for our visitors to become active themselves. They were able to move our robots by hand over a small field they had brought with them and score a goal or two themselves. In addition, of course, there was also the opportunity to get in touch with our members and to find out more about our club life, the robots and our Robocupliga.

Despite the rather moderate weather, the university group presentation was attended by some students and we are now happy to welcome some new motivated faces to our association.

If you would like to join us, simply contact us at info@robotics-erlangen.de.

RoboCup Crailsheim: Summary

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Now that the RoboCup Crailsheim is coming to an end, we can give a summary of the weekend.

Our team was able to draw a lot of valuable conclusions from the tournament: why is it possible for us to forget to load the shot in a real tournament game? Shouldn’t something like this be activated automatically? Is our radio actually as robust as we thought? Why didn’t we pass in this or that game situation, although it would have made sense?

Many questions to which we can now throw many minutes of saved game material. But it’s not just us: The other teams were also able to gain valuable insights from the tournament and praised the RoboCup-like overall situation. Accordingly, the teams are all the more pleased to hear that both the city of Crailsheim and the Crailsheim company are planning to hold the tournament every year!

As a living location for robotics and automation, the Crailsheim location and the company Gerhard Schubert, which is inseparably rooted in robotics, only benefit from inspiring young talent from the region with the strengths of robotics and STEM subjects. As a university group, we are therefore very pleased to be able to do our part!

So we only have two things left to say: See you all at RoboCup Bordeaux – as well as RoboCup Crailsheim 2024!