[robocup-nao] SPL Rule Draft for 2012

[Stefan Tasse]

Dear Joã Silva,

thanks for the input! I hope it is ok for you that our reply goes to the 
public SPL list. Probably other teams might have had similar thoughts, 
so the TC's opinion might interest them, too.

In short, none of the two issues will change for RoboCup 2012.

Concerning the swapping of team robot team colors in the half time:
We will continue to switch the direction of play and the colors at 
half-time in order to minimize any accusation of the introduction of bias.
 From our perspective, a much more interesting change would be custom 
jerseys! (Those of course the robots would keep for the whole game.) 
However, we have not figured out a safe way to do this, both from the 
hardware point of view (entangled robots, keeping sonar sensors free, 
etc.), and from having non-biased color schemes. Maybe some of you have 
good ideas for this for RoboCup 2013.

Concerning the introduction of extra computers in communication with the 
robots:
Well, one possibility to do this would be to define a common interface 
and provide another computer per field in competitions besides the 
GameController. However, to really provide a view of this data, we would 
need a big screen. Seeing how the RoboCup organizers never provided even 
one screen per field to visualize the scores and currently playing 
teams, we don't expect to have such hardware available. So this option 
will not be implemented anytime soon.
And actually, your motivation for this has mostly been debugging. I 
understand this, but you can already do this during test games on the 
venue. Allowing this during real games with computers and interfaces 
which are not provided by the league's organizers, but by the teams, 
this would introduce serious possibilities to cheat. Pushing a single 
key in the right situation could change a game.
In my opinion there are better debugging possibilities which already 
comply to the rules, even during games. In my team, we log all high 
level behavior decisions and input during a game. Combining this with a 
recorded video of the game gives you a pretty good idea about what went 
wrong. This is much better compared to keeping one eye on a live view of 
the robots' localization and one on the field, and then guessing what 
happened in that situation and why.

Therefore we see no necessity to change our rule about allowing 
communication only "among robots on the field and between robots and the 
GameController", and no other external computers or robots.

Best regards,
Stefan Tasse
(SPL TC)



16.03.2012 15:30, João Silva:
> Dear members of the SPL TC,
>
> On behalf of the Portuguese Team, I would like to propose 2 small 
> changes to the SPL rules.  I am sorry for the late proposals, and we 
> understand if you would not consider the topics for this year. We 
> consider, however, that the 2 topics are really small details, easily 
> manageable:
>
>  - One of the proposals is that the team's color should be the same 
> throughout the whole game, which would make the whole game easier to 
> follow for the audience. This is already the case for penalty 
> shootouts. We consider that it would also be very beneficial to 
> generalize it for the whole game.
>
>  - The second proposal is the introduction/allowance of one extra 
> computer for each team that would only be used to monitor their 
> robots. The monitoring of the robots state would allow the teams to 
> more easily understand what the robot is doing and detect any 
> situations that should not happen, thus promoting faster problem 
> detection and consequent evolution. Considering the problem of 
> localization, for instance, one cannot know if a robot is lost if we 
> don't have information of where it thinks it is. The best way to 
> accomplish this would be to have this information on a screen, where 
> the humans could easily see where the robot think it is and assess if 
> it is well positioned or lost.
>
> Once again, sorry for the late contact. Hope to hear from you soon.
>
> Best regards
> João Silva, Portuguese Team