[robocup-small] Rule changes in SSL

[Mike Licitra]

We generally support (or at least accept) all the changes except for
point 7 (6 bots per team).
 
As some other teams mentioned, we also think that the field will become
a bit too crowded. More importantly, increasing the amount of robots
each year might give a disadvantage to financially limited teams. We are
trying hard to stretch our current budget to build 5 robots, there is
little chance for 6. We would have to use one of last years' robots as a
placeholder.
   
Maybe a temporary rule like "if one of the two competing teams has only
5 robots then the other team will also have to only use 5 robots" would
help. However, we realize that this might not be considered as fair for
all the teams which actually managed it to construct 6 robots.
 
Furthermore, we also believe that the suggested "energy consumption
limitation" for 2006 is partly a step in the wrong direction. For many
teams, RoboCup is just as much an electronic/mechanical engineering
challenge as it is on the software side. The development of faster
performing robots should be encouraged and we believe that they should
be used to their fullest physical potential and not artificially
limited. The goal should not be to make them more similar to the
physical performance of humans, but rather to outperform it.

We also don't think that these energy limitations really offer that much
of a new research potential since the simulation league has had similar
artifical limitations on their virtual physical constraints for many
years. Especially on the big field it is helpful to always run at
maximum performance in order to i.e. drive around the ball and stop it
from getting out of bounds. So please, let's leave artificial
limitations of this kind to simulation league.
 
Stefan Zickler, Mike Licitra
 
UB Robotics
University at Buffalo
http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/ubr/robocup.php
 
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