[robocup-humanoid] RoboCup HL 2018 rule proposal (up for discussion until 2018-02-23)

[Maike Paetzel]

Dear RoboCup Humanoid Teams,
after the first successful trial in 2017, we'll continue to include the community in the discussion of the Humanoid League rules to make the process more open and transparent. The Technical Committee prepared a draft during the last month with the suggested rule changes. The draft is based on the last year's team leader meeting with some additions by the Technical Committee. In addition, there is a proposal for adding a new Technical Challenge. The proposal for this new Technical Challenge is published and open for discussions as well. The Technical Committee has not yet voted on whether to include the new challenge and which other one to replace and we appreciate comments and suggestions from the community.

The rule draft and the proposal for the new Technical Challenge are published on the RoboCup Humanoid website: https://www.robocuphumanoid.org/materials/rules/
They are also pushed to the git repository: https://github.com/RoboCup-Humanoid-TC/Rules

As last year, the discussion is carried out in the forum of the RoboCup Humanoid League: https://hl.forum.robocup.org/
The Technical Committee will try to take part in the forum discussions as much as possible. The discussion phase ends 2018-02-23. The contributions and discussions up to then will be reviewed by the Technical Committee and - in case of mixed opinions about a topic - the Technical Committee will vote on issues brought up. We hope to have the final rule book ready by mid March 2018.

If you spot some spelling or formatting errors, please feel free to either report them in the forum or - better - change them in the LaTeX source and create a pull request in the github repository (only for changes that do NOT change the content of the rules).

In addition, please remember that we are also trying to make the GameController better every year. The repository for the GameController can be found here: https://github.com/RoboCup-Humanoid-TC/GameController
You are welcome to post issues there in case you have feature requests or bug reports. We also welcome contributions to the GameController, which can be added as a pull request. The same is true for the team communication protocol: https://github.com/RoboCup-Humanoid-TC/mitecom
Especially if you have implementations for the GameController or the team communication protocol for ROS or other widely used frameworks, we welcome those to be shared with the community.

As last year, we are very interested in reading your opinions about the rule changes to make the new rules as good and flawless as possible. So please use this opportunity and participate in the forum discussions!

Cheers,
Maike (for the RoboCup Humanoid Technical Committee)