[robocup-small] Rule changes in SSL (automatic ref and battery swapping)

[The BitShifter]

I find this "energy budget" of an automatic ref an interesting concept.   I 
have some questions about the idea.

Would the energy budget be global to the team?  If not, how do you propose 
to track the energy expenditure on a per robot basis with just a vision 
system?  If the only common feature that can be detected across all 
patterns, how does one account for arbitrary movements of a robot when its 
team mark may be occluded by a handler etc?

Does the energy budget build over time?  An analogy, if a real 
football(soccer) player sprinted multiple times across the field, he would 
become tired.  If that same player then stood in place for the next couple 
of minutes, he would regain his or her stamina.  Also in the case of real 
football, there is a break at halftime.  I would imagine most players would 
recover their stamina to a large extent.

How would a team be penalized for  going over the energy budget?  Also would 
it be charged to the team or the specific offending robot?  If its a 
specific offending robot, how would the automatic ref  signal an arbitrary 
robot to a team?

How would an automatic ref account for substitutions?

As for the proposed rule that sparked this line, Would we eliminate 
substitutions of robots at the half (or at any other time)?  If we restrict 
the capacity and swapping of batteries, but do not eliminate substitutions, 
we effectively penalize teams that cannot afford to build enough robots to 
swap them out at the half.  Teams that can field two complete teams would 
have an unfair advantage of fresh batteries at the half.  Also, by 
restricting battery swapping, we would not realisticly account for the 
players ability to regain stamina at the half by the simple act of resting.

Mark Goldman
Ohio University, RoboCats

The views and opinions expressed are my own and not, necissarily, those of 
my team.

>Just a comment about battery capacities. The real capacity can
>differ sometimes by up to 20% from the nominal capacity. It also changes
>with the age of the battery. So, what you want would be nice, but in
>real life
>some teams would end up having 20% more energy than others, depending
>on battery brand.
>
> >(c) Limit the battery capacity
> >(d) No replacing of batteries allowed during the game
>
>That is why my proposal to use an all-electronic referee in 2006
>(I repeat 2006) includes the idea of doing some form of energy
>management,
>purely using the vision software and not by hardware.
>
>Measuring energy consumption on the robot itself using hardware could be
>also done, of course, but could lead to horrible discussions ("your
>measuring
>hardware is giving incorrect readings", etc.).