[robocup-legged] Rule Changes and Poll

[Colin McMillen]

> 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.

I do not speak for any team, nor am I making a vote, but:

In real soccer (at least in professional games) there are significant
advertisements present on a wall around the field.  In the past, we
have had team logos, Sony logos, Aibo logos, etc. in the area nearby
the fields, but always on the "outside" from the robot's point of view
(on the outside of the walls back when we had walls, now on the sides
of the raised field, etc.)

It would be interesting to allow each team to make one logo or banner
and place it in a (static) location around each field, in areas where
the robots can see the logos and localize based on them if they so
choose.  Since these "markers" are free-form and similar to what you
might see in real soccer, they would increase the realism of the game
while still providing some "natural" landmarks as additional visual
cues to the robots.  (The crowd is much too unstructured -- and far
away -- for the AIBO to do any meaningful localization directly on the
audience, I think.)

To make these "markers" more useful to the robots (and not look too
ugly around the field), the technical committee could specify that
they must be a rectangle of a certain size, have a white background
with black text or drawing, and maybe a black border.

Just an interesting thought...

In more general terms, I agree that we shouldn't be too interested in
making sure the games are "entertaining".  Watching AIBOs run in
circles and fall over is entertaining enough to the vast majority of
outside observers.  Few of the local people at the venue know much
about past RoboCup history and will not complain if the quality of
play decreases slightly for a year.  Our goal should be to push the
science forward whenever possible.

Colin

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