[robocup-small] November RoboCup SSL Update and Response to Request of Transparency

[Carla Cosenza]

Dear SSL community,


First of all, thank you very much for your valuable and constructive feedback so far. And also thanks to the teams to raise their concerns.



Here is some feedback to the questions from recent mails:


Introducing walls in 2020

Walls will still be optional. The incentive of how the optionallity has been defined is: If the majority of the teams prefer to play with walls, more games will actually be played with walls. If a few teams prefer it, there will be less games with walls. We could change the rule such that both teams have to agree to play with walls, if that is the preferred option for the majority of teams.

We also considered other options to test the idea of walls, but they all have their issues:

A mandatory technical challenge would require several games to be played, besides the official tournament. This is hard to fit into the schedule and means more games for the teams.

Based on the experience of recent years, teams do not, or cannot, spend as much time working on technical challenges as on the main game. In the case of demos and TCs, teams may not fully adapt to the gameplay with walls and we would not be able to see the full potential of gameplay with walls.

That led us to the idea to integrate it into the group stage. And if teams already started trying out things, they might want to play more than one game with walls.

We are still open for better suggestions to test such ideas effectively.


As of now we do have some example gameplay between some of the Japanese teams on a field with the walls configuration: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/c7t3b6du7fvu5ry/AADwUJ8tqclBXMIaXpJWP5ixa?dl=0

The committees made several observations from the practice game, both encouraging and indicating further work, but we would like to provide the videos to the community without these observations to allow everyone to make their own observations without bias


Long-Term Objectives of the SSL

We have understood that teams wish a better view on the long term roadmap of the SSL. We talked a lot about the future of the SSL recently, and this is under active discussion among the ECs, trustees, and the President. This will be a topic of major discussion during both the open and closed committee meetings at RoboCup 2020.


11 robots and field size

The issue with the defense is a good point that should be further investigated. One way to mitigate this issue would be to increase the defense area and goal width only.

The current field size is not intended to be “final” for multiple years. We fully intend to re-evaluate each year as we progress, based on game metrics including pass success rates, shot precision, and robot navigation speeds.


Inconsistent handling of fouls

That’s at least partially a misunderstanding (see the comments in the spreadsheet). For fouls, the foul counter is incremented already, so this was not explicitly added in the spreadsheet.


What’s next?

We asked to submit feedback till the end of November so that we can prepare an agenda for the announced online meeting with the team leaders. We plan to hold two meetings to make it more likely that everyone can attend.


We will do our best to reply to all the feedback that is coming in. Some of the answers are not as easy to answer as others, so we focus on those, which can easily be answered and collect the remaining ones.

Some concerns are much easier to be discussed verbally. That’s why we proposed the online meeting.


We will create an agenda based on the concerns and feedback we got and publish it here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IUZ7o8Z7wXe-BFXQOsCmQ3Z-ielWMzkHt0PYEMT0giw/edit?usp=sharing


Which of the proposals will be implemented?

Most of the feedback so far was rather negative. We would like to setup a form where teams can submit their votes to get a better idea of what is the general consensus among all teams and to get individual feedback to each proposed rule change.



Reminder

Please fill out this form (or send us the Name, Team and Mail of your leader): https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScXR8BGCPYzZVHh0YUw8S75rYmV5HmCZk6xdenIvRXbV5yhbQ/viewform?usp=sf_link


Thank you!


The Technical, Organization, and Executive Committees of the Small Size League



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