Monday August 28th Today was the first day of the round robin matches. You can check out the scores here. We also learned that Essex will be unable to compete against the UNSW team tomorrow. One of the Essex team has been unable to get an Australian visa, as he did not apply in time, and the team leader's hard drive has crashed. They've said that they'll try and compete against McGill the next day, so hopefully they'll at least get some competition experience. Competition experience is really important for a team to be able to develop their strategies. The first match was played between Osaka and Sweden. The walk that Osaka developed last year still seems to be being used this year. It has been tweaked, but it was recognised straight away. Sweden are much improved over last year, and played a good match. The two goalies got a good workout, but Sweden ended up running in three goals to win the match. The next match between LRP and Pennsylvania was one that the team wanted to watch closely. We wanted to know how LRP had tried to improve their team over last years. Surprisingly, their walk still seems be largely unchanged from last year. Penn's team are also much improved, and they scored their very first goal in Robocup. Ken from the Penn team joked that they'd done all they wanted and might as well go home. The second half saw LRP dominate the field more, and they scored two goals to win the match. Before the first UNSW match against McGill, Son was understandably a bit nervous. However, he needn't have worried. UNSW won the match a convincing fourteen to nil. The crowd and other teams alike were impressed with the sheer speed of the UNSW robots, and their ball-handling skills. But while the crowd was delighted, the other teams looked a bit more worried :) The final match for the day was CMU vs Humboldt. It's really good to see how teams have improved since last year. Humboldt are much better than last year, but their goalie let them down a bit, and CMU won the match 4 - 0.

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