[robocup-legged] New robot in the Standard Platform League

[Thomas Röfer]

Dear Teams,

the RoboCup Federation has decided to accept the proposal of Aldebaran
Robotics (http://www.aldebaran-robotics.com) to provide their humanoid robot
Nao as successor of the AIBO in the Standard Platform League (the former
Four-Legged League), at least for two years.

The Four-Legged League is renamed to "Standard Platform League". The main
property of this league is that all teams the same platform, i.e. there is
no hardware development. In 2008, there will be two competitions: The AIBO
competition (for the last time) and the Nao competition. We currently assume
that there will be 24 teams in both competitions together (e.g. 8 teams in
the Nao league and 16 in the AIBO league).

Aldebaran Robotics will starting the production of the Nao in the beginning
of 2008. They plan to be able to provide 2 robots to a limited number of
teams at the end of February 2008 and another 2 at the end of May.

The pricing is currently intended to be:

Single Nao: 4500 Euro + VAT
RoboCup Package of 4 Naos: 11000 Euro + VAT
Additional Nao if you already bought the RoboCup package: 3600 Euro + VAT

There will be an official call for participation later. However, for
planning purposes it would be nice to know how many teams would like to
participate in the Nao league under these conditions. If more teams are
interested in participation than Aldebaran Robotics can provide robots for,
there will be some kind of qualification procedure.

Since the "Four-Legged League" is renamed to "Standard Platform League",
there now exist a number of aliases for the existing sources of information:

http://www.tzi.de/spl (currently just a forward)
spl_tech at tzi.de
spl_orga at tzi.de
spl_web at tzi.de

The 4legged/legged variants will keep working for quite a while.

Best regards

Thomas Röfer

_______________________________________________________________________
Dr. Thomas Röfer                   Office Address:
DFKI-Lab Bremen                    Universität Bremen
Safe and Secure Cognitive Systems  Cartesium 02.054
Robert-Hooke-Str. 5                Enrique-Schmidt-Str. 5
28359 Bremen, Germany              28359 Bremen, Germany
http://www.dfki.de                 www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~roefer

Phone: +49 (421) 218-64200
Fax:   +49 (421) 218-9864200
eMail: Thomas.Roefer at dfki.de
_______________________________________________________________
Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH
Firmensitz: Trippstadter Straße 122, D-67663 Kaiserslautern

Geschäftsführung:
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Wolfgang Wahlster (Vorsitzender)
Dr. Walter Olthoff

Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats:
Prof. Dr. h.c. Hans A. Aukes

Amtsgericht Kaiserslautern, HRB 2313