Today is the day: we finally get to enter the hall. Accordingly, we set off early to catch the tram. The destination: Parc des Exposition. As we enter the tram, we are pleasantly surprised to see that RoboCup is actually advertising this year, a novelty! The RoboCup vibe spreads instantly, and everyone hopes that this time there might even be spectators!

But one thing at a time: first, we need to reach our destination and get inside the hall. Due to the political circumstances, we have to undergo a bag check, but apart from that, there are no further incidents, allowing our feet to touch the hallowed ground.

After unloading all our robots and equipment, we also try to pick up the event shirts. However, we quickly realize that it’s not as easy as it seems, as the hoodies and T-shirts can be customized this year. The creativity of our members knows no bounds, and we now have an official traffic light trio.

Freshly equipped with T-shirts and hoodies, we immediately dive into the important tasks: cutting out colored papers for the top of our covers (for the why, see this explanation), finalizing and setting aside the robots.

And just like that, it’s already noon, and it’s time to have lunch with our longtime friends UBC Thunderbots (Vancouver, Kanada). With the beautiful weather, there are plenty of options, as food trucks park outside the hall especially for RoboCup.

After lunch, we continue testing, and in the evening, we even get to test on the real playing field. Here, we notice that our new radio system, sponsored by Gerhard Schubert and HBC Radiomatic, runs smoothly, seamlessly, and without any signal interruptions, much to our delight. Our old radio system was quite unreliable, and we faced massive signal dropouts in almost every game.

However, there seem to be some firmware issues. Sometimes, when the robot changes its frequency (the new radio system is based on frequency hopping), the radio completely fails for the robot. But we are optimistic that we can fix this bug in our firmware.

And so, an action-packed first setup day slowly comes to an end for us. Unfortunately, due to the current political events, the last tram already departs at 6:45 PM, forcing many teams to leave the hall early. Although this does not affect us as our hotel is within walking distance, it is certainly disappointing for the other teams. We sincerely hope that the situation will improve in the coming days and that all teams will have equal opportunities to test their hardware in practice.

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.

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.