[robocup-legged] Rule Changes and Poll

[walter.nistico at uni-dortmund.de]

Dear all,

As you know, the 4-Legged League used to have some kind of "periodicity"
concerning innovations to the rules and hardware, where typically years of
major changes, like field structure or new robots, alternated with years
where the rules remained basically unchanged, to focus the innovation on the
high level behaviors and the quality of the games.

However, this year is a bit special, since it could possibly be the last one
of the 4-Legged League, at least for the league as we have known it until
now, and a lot of discussion has been going on in the Technical Committee
concerning the direction that the league should take for the upcoming
competitions.

According to the previous periodicity, this year should be the target of
major innovations, and some people advocates the need to show that our
league is on the cutting edge of scientific innovation to send a strong
signal to the RoboCup Committee, which might otherwise decide to discontinue
the league altogether; others instead feel that it is more important to
offer high quality games as a kind of "swan's song" of a league which has
always been characterized by its spectacular and entertaining games.

 

Encouraged by the positive results of the last technical challenge, and a
general consensus expressed in meetings at the last competitions (and among
the Technical Committee itself), we are happy to announce that the new goals
(with cylindrical posts and crossbar) have been approved to replace the
traditional "box-like" ones.

The new goals are both more pleasing to see (and offer the possibility to
the audience to see through them) and offer better features for
localization.

 

However, another possible major change to the field structure - namely, the
removal or altering of the colored beacons - has proved to be much more
controversial, since on one hand it represents an important step to make the
robots' environment less "artificial", but on the other hand it could
severely impact the quality of the games or require a full year of
development just to reach the same results of 2006.

As such, the Technical Committee has agreed to resolve the matter through a
poll.

The poll is asking you to vote for 4 possibilities: completely removing the
beacons, replacing them with 4 non unique beacons, replacing them with 2
beacons, and leave the original beacons unchanged.

These possibilities are illustrated by pictures which you find attached to
this mail; please keep in mind that such pictures are just explanatory and
that the Technical Committee might decide later to change some details like
the positioning of such beacons or the colors.

The rules of the poll are as follows:

*  All teams which have successfully qualified for the 4-Legged League
Soccer competition of RoboCup 2005 and 2006 are entitled to vote, as long as
they intend to participate in 2007. Sorry, but "Challenge Only" teams cannot
vote, since we feel this decision will mostly affect the soccer games

* Each team has to rank the 4 available voting options from 1 to 4, where
"1" is their preferred (i.e. highest ranked) choice. No two (or more)
options can have the same rank

The ranking has to be emailed to the Technical Committee at
legged_tech at tzi.de in the following format:

 

(Example)

 

Team name: DEMOTeam

Qualified for RoboCup: 2005, 2006

Preference Ranking: 

1) Two Beacons

2) Non Unique

3) No Beacons

4) No Change

 

* The poll will end on the 1st of October, at 12:00GMT. In order for the
poll to be considered valid, at least 15 votes must have been expressed.

* The poll results will be announced by the Technical Committee shortly
thereafter.

Greetings,

Walter

 

-- 

Ing. Walter Nistico

Robotics Research Institute (IRF)

Information Technology Section

Dortmund University

Otto-Hahn-Str. 8

44227 Dortmund, Germany

Phone: +49 231 7554533

Fax: +49 231 7553251

 

 

 

 

 

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