[robocup-legged] Thinking about the future of our league ...

[Thomas Röfer]

> I absolutely agree that we should start discussing this problem as
> early as
> possible.

Hi,

well the plan is as follows: there will be a request for proposals sent to
several companies to come up with a successor for the AIBO. It should be
similar to the AIBO in several aspects, (standard platform, many degrees of
freedom, directed perception, full autonomy, wireless communication) and it
would be desirable if it would be modular, so that the TC can not only
decide on the rules but also, in a certain amount, about changes in the
robot platform (e.g. springs in the legs). We don't want to limit the
possible offers too much, so we would like to have a wide bandwidth of
offers, so that we are able to select the most interesting one (which has
not necessarily to be a four-legged robot). However, one thing is almost
sure: it will be more expensive than the AIBO, because it will not be a mass
product (the league only requires ~200 robots).

> I just wanted to add that we currently have an open-source project that
> implements the OPEN-R API. It isn't finished, but it is already capable
> of
> running an OPEN-R object on a standard pc (linux and Mac only, for
> now). So
> the estimated time to migrate to a new platform is well.. the
> recompilation
> time :)
> Although the project isn't finished (yet), I'm sure that if agreed and
> with
> all teams working on the project, it would be finished in a month or
> even
> less.
> --> http://opensdk.sourceforge.net/

That sounds interesting and may help some teams to port their code. However,
there are other teams that already have abstracted from Open-R and may want
to port their abstractions to the new robots. For instance, the GermanTeam
framework runs on Open-R, Win32, WinCE, and Linux in different projects (on
AIBOs, humanoid robots, and autonomous wheelchairs), and a couple of teams
are using it (and have actually no idea of Open-R calls and data
structures).

Anyway, we have to see what companies come up with (maybe some ARM-based
system).

Best regards

Thomas Röfer

_______________________________________________________________________
Dr. Thomas Röfer                   Office Address:
DFKI-Lab Bremen                    Universität Bremen
Safe and Secure Cognitive Systems  Cartesium 0.055
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