[robocup-small] tournament format, technical challenges, penalty shootout, robot markings

[Alexander Danzer]

Hi,

First, a big thank you to all of you for this great Robocup we had in 
Leipzig.
For the next Robocup, we have a lot of ideas in the TC and OC on how to 
improve
the Small Size League. We would like to share our ideas and invite you 
to
contribute with proposals:

1. New tournament format
As discussed at the open OC TC meeting in Leipzig, there exist several 
ideas
for an improved tournament format. Desirable properties would be a 
double
elimination system, a reduced number of matches and matches with teams 
at
a similar level. Please send us your proposals. The proposals should 
take this
year's Robocup teams as a starting point to show how the exact 
implementation
looks like.

2. Technical challenges
We are open to any ideas for technical challenges for next year. As 
always, they
should work on interesting research problems with the goal to improve 
the SSL.

3. Penalty shootout
There have been some complaints about the current form of deciding upon 
a winner
in a tied match. Penalties offer little interesting AI aspects and have
a very high success rate. If you have any ideas how a more interesting
procedure could look like, please write us. (For example, take ice 
hockey
penalties as a reference).

4. Robot markings
Spectators, especially those not familiar with the SSL, have a hard time 
telling
the team to which an individual robots belongs to.
We therefore decided that "head bands" will be put at the topmost 
centimeter of
the robots of one of the two teams, as CMDragons did this year. Please 
consider
this when you work on your robots for next year's Robocup.

Best,
Alex