[robocup-small] Ideas for 2007 Rules

James Bruce bruce at andrew.cmu.edu
Sun Oct 15 23:27:31 EDT 2006


Hi everyone,

The following are my *personal* thoughts on the rules changes I think
might be useful for the league.  I'm not speaking in any official way
at this point, merely putting out these ideas for discussion.  In a
few weeks the TC will take the public discussion to form concrete
rules proposals.  Please post any rules changes you would like to see,
as now is the time to have them heard and discussed.

Jim Bruce

================================

- Move to a partially automatic ethernet-based referee box

   I liked the demonstration by Plasma-Z on semi-automated refereeing.
   To make such a system practical, we would need to move to an
   ethernet-based referee box.  This has some other advantages: (1) no
   more need for split-serial cables, and finding long ethernet cables
   is much easier. (2) it makes it easier to verify teams are connected
   to the referee using a "heartbeat" message. (3) it is much easier to
   find computers with two ethernet ports now compared to an extra
   serial port. (4) if the long term plan is to move to a shared vision
   system, we will need to develop a shared ethernet-based
   communications system anyway.

   The challenge, of course, is transitioning to a new system, and
   helping teams to correctly set up separate ethernet networks on
   their computers (we do not want one shared system, as it opens up
   all sorts of problems with communication interference).

   We could try to develop an ethernet+serial referee box during the
   transition period.  I would be willing to help out in that effort.

- Decrease timeout time to 5 minutes

   Motivation: keep the games moving, and get them back under an hour.
   Teams need to be ready for games.

- Are chip kicks now too powerful for the goalie?

   Proposal: allow a second defender to enter the defense area for a
   limited time (3 seconds perhaps?)
   Alternate Proposal: split the defense area into a small "no two
   defenders" area, and a larger "no goalie touching" area.  This will
   allow defenses a better chance of blocking while still preventing
   walls across the entire goal.

   Motivation: In the China open last week, for the first time two
   teams capable of "header" shots met each other (CMDragons,
   ZJUNlict).  After some early games adjusting things, we ended up
   doing a TV demo that resulted in a 4-3 score after less than 8
   minutes of play.  That projects out to a 16-12 or 16-15 score at the
   end of the game, which is probably a little too high.

   On the other hand, maybe corner kicks *should* be dangerous, just
   like in real soccer.  If a team can complete too high a percentage
   of corner kicks however, this can become a problem.

- Teams must prove kickers are legal

   Right now, there are a lot of chip kicker designs, including
   short-travel wedges (the FU-Fighters 2005 design), wedges that
   travel near the robot, and "scoops" that sweep outward from the
   robot.  Some are easy to prove legal, such as the short travel
   wedge, since the ball cannot ever violate the 20% rule throughout
   the travel.  Scoop kickers are a bit more problematic, as legality
   depends on the dynamics.  The ball *could* become illegal, but its
   unclear if it *does*.  At the last competition the rules committee
   ended up having to show kickers were illegal, when really the burden
   should be on the teams.

- General kick speed limitation?
   Maybe we should limit kicks to some reasonable upper limit, such as
   10 m/s (CMDragons was using 15 m/s for the last three games).  What
   is needed however is some way of enforcing this.  I don't have any
   good ideas on this, but maybe someone else does.

- Increase team size to 6 robots
   I think this might be the year to increase the number of robots, to
   add more possibilities for passing, and to get closer to 11-vs-11 in
   a manageable way.  Teams are scoring now, so we don't have the
   situation of a few years ago with many 0-0 or 1-0 games.  However,
   in order to prevent teams from stacking to defense too much, we
   could *require* that at least one robot stay as a forward at all
   times (i.e. a team must keep one robot on the offense side of the
   field at all times).  This is kind of a reverse-offsides rule.

- small field size increase (outer size unchanged)

   With kicks now given 100mm from the border, the outer 300mm border
   is not really necessary.  Thus, without any changes to vision
   systems, we could decrease the outer border to 200mm on each side,
   enlarging the field by 200mm in both dimensions.  In our lab, we
   would not have enough space for this change, and this is probably
   the case for many teams.  However, the size difference is not so
   large, so teams should be able to verify easily that they can play
   on such a field.

- No travel support for teams that have not participated in a local
   RoboCup competition or a RoboCup international competition within
   the last two years.  (or maybe, no admittance, with the exception
   that some local teams may be allowed to compete).

   Motivation: we still have a problem with teams that come to the
   competition but do not play, even with the "banned for two years"
   stipulation currently in the rules.  I'm interesting in hearing what
   people think about this issue, or if they have other approaches to
   the addressing the problem.



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