Today was the second competition day at Robocup.  Our first game of the day was against SPQR (from Italy) at 1:40pm.  The wireless for this game was terrible – with over 60 seconds of lag between when a message was sent from the game controller to when the robots recieved the signal.  This also meant that our team was unable to communicate with each other.  These factors, along with a few other bugs that were exposed under these scenaros, led to a very ugly game that ended with us losing 2-4.  We were unable to even watch the last five minutes of this game because we had game controller and head referee duties for another game during the last five minutes (due to the two timeouts and 1 official time out – over 20 minutes of timeouts in total plus more time spent attempting to determine what to do – our game went much longer than expected).

We were all pretty down after this loss.  However, with this loss we knew a win in the game later in the day against rUNSWift (from Australia) was necessary to have any hope of reaching the quarterfinals.  We spent the time between games working on our strategies to employ if we were unable to use game controller in future games.

We played rUNSWift at 6pm.  We scored first and then they scored before the first half ended 1-1.  Overall, our play looked decent – much more like what our code normally looks like.  In general, our players were able to communicate over the wireless and didn’t have too much lag on recieving game controller packets.  The second half was a true battle, but we scored with about 30 seconds left in the half.  rUNSWift called a timeout, but then realized that ‘set’ would take longer than 30 seconds, and conceded the game.  Overall, it was a well fought game on both sides, and probably could have gone either way.  However, we were very happy with the much needed win.

We still need to win against TJArk tomorrow at 11:20am (by a large enough margin – just a win is not enough) to advance to the quarterfinals, as two teams from each pool will advance.  Today was a stressful day, and tomorrow promises to be just as stressful.  If we advance to the quarterfinals, we’ll have another game in the evening tomorrow – but likely against an easier team.