[robocup-legged] Rule Changes and Poll

[Oskar von Stryk]

Hi Thomas, hi all,

2 remarks:

1) 
Who will argue for continuing the 4L if the last year of the competition 
with Aibos was neither high quality nor entertaining?

2)
For a major innovation leap forward there are more appealing 
and more challenging alternatives
than discussing beacons/localization only, for example, a very new 
tournament structure allowing only soccer games of joint teams of the 
software of 2 teams in 2007 (take, e.g., the NUbots and UNSW demo of 2005 
or the 11-11 demo game in 2006). 
The round robin could be played in a variation of combinations
e.g., teams A & B vs. teams C&D, then A&C vs. B&D and so on
and each team getting their joint score as individual record
for determing the round robin ranking.

Therefore the field and team size could be increased as well,
e.g., field in length and breadth times 30% and teams of 6 players.

Such a change would be a real major innovation which other leagues 
never thought of implementing yet which would show the 4L on the cutting 
edge of multi-robot research. 

The 2007 year of change would be an ideal date for some more revolutionary 
changes. I am sure there will be many more exciting ideas
for major innovations in rule changes which would make the games in 2007
more than a localization challenge with no beacons.

I believe the 4L should try a more revolutionary step which would also 
make all other leagues very curious to watch the games in 2007
(the change of beacons will not).

Thanks for your time.
Cheers,
Oskar

On Sun, 24 Sep 2006, Thomas Röfer wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> > I am afraid that under the current limitation of the Aibo's vision
> > the variant "3) no beacons" (although very appealing) incorporates
> > the highest risk of not to achieve the goal of major innovations and
> > high quality games in 2007.
> 
> I think there is a certain misperception about what makes our league
> interesting in the eyes of the RoboCup trustees. It is basically the
> research that is performed and how the work done contributes to the overall
> goal of RoboCup. There is surely a certain interest in high quality games,
> but it is most certainly not the intention of the RoboCup trustees to stop
> the continuous change toward the 100x70 qm outdoor field in a soccer stadium
> the 2050 humanoid robots will have to deal with. With removing the beacons
> the quality of game play may be reduced in 2007, but I would not expect it
> to drop dramatically.
> 
> We need new challenges. In fact half of the talks given at the RoboCup
> Symposium 2006 were coming from our league (congratulations!!!), but I had
> the impression that most of the things presented did not make its way to the
> actual games. For the AI magazine article on RoboCup 2006 I had to answer
> the question "What are the improvements from 2005 to 2006?" and I had no
> good answer to this question, for instance I found no answers in the TDPs of
> the two finalists.
> 
> Removing the beacons may ruin self-localization. So either we have to invent
> methods to still be able to metrically self-localize without them (I think
> that is still possible), our we have to rely on a more qualitative way of
> self-localization (as human soccer player most certainly do). So this poses
> challenges to most parts of the control software: image-processing (perceive
> more/other objects), world-modeling, behavior control (play with more
> uncertainty, without metric position), attention control, and multi-robot
> collaboration (can teammates help the attacker in localization?).
> 
> After 2007, we may change the robot platform to something new. Since it is
> quite sure that the central sensor will still be a directed camera, the
> research on localization without beacons is not in vain.
> 
> Best regards
> 
> Thomas Röfer
> 
> _______________________________________________________________________
> Dr. Thomas Röfer                   Office Address:
> DFKI-Lab Bremen                    Universität Bremen
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> 
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> Fax:   +49 (421) 218-9864200
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> 
> 
> 
> 
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--
Prof. Dr. Oskar von Stryk           E-Mail: stryk(at)sim.tu-darmstadt.de
Simulation and Systems Optimization Phone:  ++49 (0) 6151-16-2513
Technische Universitaet Darmstadt   Fax:    ++49 (0) 6151-16-6648
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