Match day 2
Today we played against 2 teams and had 1 super team match. During the day, we also had a poster presentation and an interview. Just like the day before, it was a very intensive matchday.
Today we started the day early again with some breakfast, after everyone was done having breakfast we started packing up. When everything was packed, we started heading towards the venue. Here we set up our table and started testing and calibrating our robot on the fields. This went quite well and we were confident in the upcoming match.
Match One: Mexico
Our first match of the day was against Gregorianos, a team from Mexico. They only used one robot, because their other robot didn’t function properly. The match started off strong and we managed to score quite a few goals. However, somewhere in the middle of the match, the opponent’s wheel fell off and hit the PCB of our robot. This caused a short circuit which led to something being burned. We could tell because of the smell of burnt electronics… The whole field smelled horrible. Although we had a problem, we had to continue the match, so we just used our defending robot. The attacker worked inconsistently after our teammate tried fixing it, it went out of bounds quite often. In the end, we still won with a score of 8-4.
During the break, we tried finding what caused the short circuit, but without success. So we replaced the voltage regulators with new ones and resoldered every pad on the pcb again so the tin flows in the right place. A phototransistor (that helps detecting the line) also broke during the previous match, so we replaced this as well. But when we tested with the robot, it still did not work as well as it should have and we didn’t know why. But our next match was closing in so we had to go.
Match Two: Singapore
Our second match was against Sentinels, the second team of Singapore. Both our and their robots didn’t work optimally, so the match was below our expectations. Even though our attacker had multiple difficulties and kept shutting off, our defender managed to prevent and score enough goals to secure the win. We won with a score of 6-4.
Interview Tech United
The media and grafisch design members of our team went to Tech United, a Dutch team in the major Robocup league. Here, we interviewed the team leader about who they are and how their robot works. They saw a lot of similarities with our own robot, but then a lot bigger. For example, their robot uses a kicker as well, but the solenoid they use is at least 20 times as big. They also use a camera on top of the robot, but after talking about it, they said they wanted to switch to another system for it because of it not being able to see the whole field. They had an upcoming match, so we wished them good luck and went back to work.
Poster session
After the interview, we went back to the soccer area because the poster session where all teams share and discuss ideas. We went through a lot of interesting conversations with the teams. This way everyone can learn from each other and improve their robots for the upcoming year. The poster presentation was a very fun experience and we learned a lot from other teams. The other teams also came to us with a lot of questions and they all seemed very impressed by how we designed the robot. It was nice to see that our robot is being held in high regard in the eyes of other teams. We also handed out our stickers to everyone present so they can find and contact us at anytime.
Super team Match One
After the poster session, the super team match was coming up. We went up to the field and calibrated the robot before it started. But the moment it started, our robot failed on us and didn’t want to work anymore. We tried fixing it during the match but in the end it didn’t work out. Our robot was not able to pull its weight during the match, and we felt bad towards the other teams in our super team. Luckily, they were all very friendly and didn’t seem to mind. We lost the match, but didn’t have time to linger around because directly after we had an interview with the robocupjunior jury.
Interview presentation
During the interview we showed a presentation of our team, what we have accomplished so far, how we started, what our robots consists of and why we used certain things, along with a short demonstration of the neopixels we use to troubleshoot on the ball detection sensors. The judges looked intrigued and were paying close attention to our explanation. The presentation was supposed to be 10 minutes long, but we talked a bit too long, so we had to skip through the last couple of slides. Overall, the presentation went well and when it ended we started heading back to our table to grab our things.
When we packed everything, we started going back to our hotel. In the hotel, we resoldered everything and tested everything again. This took a lot of time, but we pushed through and were able to fix most but not all problems. We hope tomorrow will go much better.
