[robocup-legged] Rule Changes and Poll

[Walter Nistico]

> In fact, it's quite entertaining, as the number of people in the
audience shows...
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No, it attracts the curiosity of people, because everybody is thrilled by
the idea of humanoid robots.
And that's the way to meet the ultimate goal of RoboCup anyway.
But as Peter said, the audience is entertained by seeing the clumsy robots
fall down and get up by themselves etc. (and this is also true for the
Aibos)


> I believe that, from a scientific standpoint, both the poles removal and
playing with mixed teams (yes, forcing teams to cooperate, both at the
human level and at the level of communiaction protocols and other
related things) are interesting challenges. For me, too, science quality
is far more important than entertainment (provided the robots do
something interesting to see, of course), but given the choices above, I
would rather go for mixed teams and enlarged fields, because both foster
cooperation and, in fact, this idea follows something the MSL is already
doing as well.
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But the MSL does it only for the new teams which are freshly qualified. In
a league where the HW is important, sharing the development burden among
two teams can have some advantages, and also it gives the
opportunity to more teams to take part in the competition.
However the top teams still compete by themselves in the MSL, and i'm not
sure how enthusiast they would be, if forced to share development with
others (and what would be the criterias for the pairing of teams?)
Concerning pick-up games, they can be interesting as a challenge.
However, anybody who has played pick-up soccer or basketball on a
playground, knows that there is very limited team play, roles are assigned
based on global positions, and then the best players start to get the ball
most of the time and try to organize the team somehow.
But humans can at least roughly estimate the skills of teammates and
opponents after a few minutes of play, and reach a better organization,
like "the worst player becomes the goalie", or "A is too slow to follow B,
so C should go instead".
In the robot case it's even worse, if a teammate does not properly
localize, he cannot even do area-based coordination, or if he sees ghost
balls or does not estimate the distance correctly, he can prevent any
teammate from getting to the ball, by claiming it for himself.
The result is that the best teams would program their robots not to trust
their teammates, excepting the known one, so just to grab the ball and
dribble around all the obstacles, i.e. the opponents and the "untrusted"
teammates.

>Pole removal, as someone mentioned before, is not even
> that realistic compared to human soccer.
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Not really.
The flags positioned on the corners of the field are there just to reduce
the ambiguity between a corner kick and a throw in when the ball goes out
there nearby.
They are not used by the football players to globally localize, they're
barely visible, and if removed they don't affect the localization of the
players at all (e.g. fog or heavy rain).
Humans localize by looking at field lines, goals, teammates and opponents,
and by observing natural landmarks like the audience etc, but to a much
lesser degree.
Greetings,
Walter


-- 
Ing. Walter Nistico
Robotics Research Institute (IRF)
Information Technology Section
Dortmund University
Otto-Hahn str. 8
44221 Dortmund, Germany
Phone: +49 231 7554533
Fax: +49 231 7553251