You can tell that Eindhoven is very excited about having RoboCup here and the local set-up crew has done a ton. But… there were a lot of items that Katie and I (along with Duncan – the Local Chair for our league) had to take care of when we arrived: painting the 8 goals yellow, rearranging tables so teams had enough space to sit and have their robots, assigning teams to said tables, reworking the brackets so that the “home team” Dutch team got to play on a field closest to the stands, add the barely-visible “throw in” dots (lines to be added tomorrow). Plus we measured fields to ensure compliance and discussed necessary barriers that need to be erected between the fields (the fields were built too close to one another). We were finally kicked out of the facility around 10:40p, and we ended up walking the 45 min/3.6 km (2.25 miles) back to the hotel.

We are finally getting in bed now… at 1:50 am! Needless to say, we are exhausted! And to that: we are getting up at 6:30 to have breakfast at 7:00 and take the robots in taxis to the venue before 8 to move the goals into place and put team namecards on the tables. Finally, then the real work starts for the team!

JT wearing the Robocup 2013 mascot head.