We won first place of the RoboCup Rescue German Open and also best in class mobility.
We are now the European champions, Hurray!!!

Sorry about the delay in updating the website, we had no internet for the whole last day of the competition.
Photos and videos to follow tonight or tomorrow morning!

Network problems fixed. We just had our run and scored another 4 victims. Identified by IR, Vision and CO2.

The finals and best in class tests are tomorrow!

We had another attempt in the arena about two hours ago. The same issues we has earlier happened again with both network interference and drop outs.
To solve the problem we have moved the newer router from the autonomous robot onto the tele-operated as it seems to have better coverage.

We have negotiated with the organisers and they have given us a chance with a later run  at 18:30. Hopefully we will have solved the network/computer issues by then. 

On a side note. We are not planning on entering the autonomous robot into any more runs as it cannot score any points without the victim identification code working.

During our last run we suffered severe Wi-Fi interference. This meant that we kept loosing the connection to the robot making it near impossible to drive.

On the up-side the team that was entering the arena after us experienced the same problems. Due to this we have been told that this round will not count and we will be given an extra attempt later today.

 Fingers crossed!

In our last run of the day we found four victims. For reliability we had disabled the arm (apart from head-pan) as we were not certain what was causing it to malfunction at the time. We have now solved the issue, so tomorrow we should have a run with a fully working arm.

The organisers of the competition have decided to make the red section of the arena more difficult by raising the size of the step near the top of the ramp from two tubes to three tubes (30cm).

No robot in RoboCup has ever successfully climbed the 30cm step, even in the finals... Until now!

 Here is a panoramic view of the arena (taken from the top of a tall ladder):

Here is the video I promised of yesterdays competition run in the arena: Youtube Video

We have just been to do our second run in the arena. We were unable to get the arm working for some strange reason, combined with a few software issues we chose to disregard the run.

Each team in the competition is allowed to disregard one run, so it does not count towards the final score.

The problems with the arm have now been fixed and it works!

We have two runs scheduled for this afternoon.

An interesting find is that the operator can see the whole chassis of the robot when the  arm is extended, which is very useful for very close quarter maneuvering.

We have done our first official run.
The tele-operated robot found 4 victims, the autonomous robot had a few problems, got stuck and was e-stopped.

Videos and photos to follow if our internet connection will allow.

The tele-operated had its first run in the arena a few hours ago and it performed very well!
At the moment the arm does not work which is something we are most focused at fixing.

The robot made very light work of the stairs and the (near) 45* ramp, proving that the choice to upgrade to maxon motors to be a very benifitial one.

The only problem we encountered during the run was that one of the surclips on the rear flipper pulleys kept falling off, this was fixed by replacing the surclip.