[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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