[robocup-small] Comments & Suggestions from B-Smart

[Marian Weirich]

Hi,

the RoboCup 2005 in Osaka was the first RoboCup for most of our Team
members. We really liked it and had a lot of fun.

Our Team has discussed a lot of rules and here are our Comments and
Suggestions:

1) Field:

The size of the field should remain nearly the same, but with a slightly
variable size, like in the real FIFA rules, so it would be a little bit
harder to adapt to the field (i.e. hard-coded corner kicks).
The offline rules should be left unchanged, but the walls of the field
should be soft, so the ball won't bounce off that far. This should also
be a combined with a light slope (like the suggestion from Mahisorn
Wongphati) to let the ball roll back into the field. It should be tested
if it is possible to play every free kick from the point, the ball
stopped rolling, to help the referee with his work.
If the restart should stay like before we would prefer having all
restarts on the touchlines and no restarts from 10cm in the field.


2) Robots:

No change for the number of robots until changing to a bigger field.

It would be interesting if the amount of power (Ah) of a team could be
the same amount for every team including the replacement robots. This
way teams would have to decide if they want to have more power in less
robots or more robots with less power. No battery switching in a game,
not even in half-time (unless a battery is broken) should be allowed.
But this would be difficult to check, it should be checked for every
game, and would be a lot more work for the referees. Unless it's easy to
check this before a game starts, we wouldn't recommend rules regarding
batteries of the robots.


3) Vision:

We wouldn't recommend switching to local vision in the near future,
because it's expensive and more difficult to use (extra lighting and so
on), so there would hardly be more work done with tactics and team play.

As a first step towards a local vision, we would recommend removing the
overhead cameras and move them to the
sides of the field, in a certain height (maybe between 2.5 and 3.5 meters).
With this change every team would need to do some work on vision and
world modeling, because watching from the side needs a bit of
prediction, but it doesn't seem to be that hard because it's already
been done in other leagues. It's possible to introduce markers on the
side of the robots, needed for local vision, and helping the side vision
to recognize the robots.

Some of our team members weren't happy with this idea, because it would
be harder to detect
the ball from the side when it's blocked by robots and thus could result
in a quite chaotic game play.


4) Penalty Kick:

For the goalie, a PK is nearly impossible to save. We would recommend
the following change (inspired by ice-hockey and other leagues
rules):
The ball should be placed on the center mark, the attacking robot should
be behind the center line and the goalie inside the defense
area. When the PK starts, both robots can move the way they want, but
the goalie may not touch the ball unless the attacker touched it
first. The robots have 30 seconds to either score a goal (attacker only)
or shoot the ball out of the field. Other robots have to stay
outside of the field, or in the other half, during the penalty kick.


5) Kickoff:

Because it's quite difficult to do a good kickoff without stupidly
shooting towards the opponent robots, one robot of the team doing the
kickoff should be allowed to move anywhere inside of the center circle,
even on the opponents side of the field.


6) Shooting:

The shots are quite hard at the moment and it should be considered using
a different ball for the game, if anyone finds a ball that will move
more slowly. Limiting the shooting power is too difficult to check for
the referees.


7) Time Penalty:

There should be a time penalty (about 1 minute), for certain rule
violations and some stupid behaviors, in which a robot is removed from
the field and switched off (so it wouldn't move anywhere offside the
field), so the team is playing with one robot less.


Time penalties could be given for the following situations:

- Shooting directly outside of the field should result in a time penalty
for the kicking robot (to have less free kicks).
Especially in Freekick situations.

- If a robot violates the 500mm distance rule with opponent free kicks
for 2 times, it should be removed from the field (not wasting time with
wrong implemented behaviors).

There could be some more violations resulting in a time penalty. No time
penalty for the goalkeeper, because shooting directly outside
should be allowed for the goalie, for clearing the ball.


8) Indirect Free kicks:

If an indirect free kick should count as a goal, a teammate has to touch
the ball as the second robot (no shooting at the opponent goalie hoping
for the ball bouncing off into the goal).


9) Chip Kick:

Chip kicks should be allowed within any situation in the game to provide
more options for passing.


10) Double Touching:

There should be double touching allowed in a radius of 50mm around the
ball, to keep the game running if the ball is only slightly moved (less
free kicks).


11) Dribbling:

Active dribbling should be restricted to 500mm radius (like before) but
passive dribbling shouldn't be restricted in distance.
To make it easier for referees to decide whether it was active or
passive dribbling, teams with active dribbling devices always have to
follow the active dribbling rule and teams with passive dribblers always
follow the rule for passive dribbling.
To make it possible to mix robots with active dribbling and passive
dribbling (i.e. goalie with active dribbling, field players with passive
dribbling) the robots should be easy to separate. Robots that are
dribbling active could use a different marking color for example.



Regards,

Marian Weirich
SSL Team B-Smart