[robocup-small] Announcements RoboCup 2021

[Tobias Heineken]

Hello!


First, thank you to everyone who filled out our survey. Your input is 
important in setting up a RoboCup like this for the first time.We want 
to share our plans and ideas for the virtual and decentralized RoboCup 2021.

TL:DR; A virtual simulated tournament will be run using the new 
SSL-Simulator protocol 
<https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2FRoboCup-SSL%2Fssl-simulation-protocol&data=04%7C01%7Crobocup-small%40cc.gatech.edu%7C16ce2da59c534e8a56b308d8c3007326%7C482198bbae7b4b258b7a6d7f32faa083%7C0%7C0%7C637473754008322167%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000&sdata=ijz%2BlFJmkSfDKIX1stZLkKBRYhjtQz35ve9fwRjGxj4%3D&reserved=0>from 20th of 
June until the 27th of June. The simulator is not decided yet and teams 
are asked to offer their implementations. Mixed division will be used 
for the virtual tournament. Both teams have to agree for each match on 
the ruleset (Div A or Div B), defaulting to Div B in case of no 
agreement. Please be prepared to play some matches with the Div B 
ruleset! As a separate tournament, there will be four hardware 
challenges for interested teams that have access to a field. They will 
be run in a decentralized way; the rules are still being drafted. The 
technical challenges planned for 2020 continue as planned, also 
decentralized. We are also asking all teamsto send their Participation 
intent <https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fssl.robocup.org%2Frobocup-2021-qulification%2F&data=04%7C01%7Crobocup-small%40cc.gatech.edu%7C16ce2da59c534e8a56b308d8c3007326%7C482198bbae7b4b258b7a6d7f32faa083%7C0%7C0%7C637473754008322167%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000&sdata=t6JkXdPw5n4PCzsNhAXgnE64006rNzGhTWlD6dBD2V4%3D&reserved=0>as outlined 
on the website until the 16th of February 2021.If you intend to 
participate in RoboCup 2021, please read this email carefully. It 
contains a lot of important information regarding the upcoming RoboCup, 
and important details have been kept out of the TL:DR.


General information for RoboCup 2021

As all teams said they are interested in a virtual tournament, we will 
organize a simulated tournament with matches spanning from the 20th of 
June until the 27th of June. This slightly prolonged timespan allows us 
to play matches even without all teams converging on a common timezone.


Virtual competition


There was quite a lot of positive response to the idea of mixing 
divisions for this year's virtual competition. We will start in a normal 
group stage like RoboCup 2016 (held in Germany) or RoboCup 2017 (held in 
Japan). At some point, most likely after the group stage or the 
lucky-loser matches, we will separate the teams into two different 
tournaments, to allow every team to play matches against equally skilled 
opponents.

Mixing divisions means both teams have to agree on the rules used for a 
match before the match starts, alike the way it was handled in RoboCup 
2014 (held in Brazil): if both teams agree to play on division A rules, 
the match is played using this ruleset, otherwise the match will fall 
back on division B rules. We encourage every team to play as many 
matches as possible with the more advanced division A ruleset, and the 
TC/OC may require teams that previously played or signed up for division 
A in 2018, 2019 or 2020 to play with these rules, if (only) their 
opponent agrees. This means every team has to be prepared to abide by 
division B rules, even if they would prefer running the more advanced 
division A ruleset.


The idea of measuring hardware capabilities was dropped, as many teams 
currently do not have access to a field. But we do believe that having 
different robots is an important part in SSL, so we will ask all 
participating teams to fill out a form regarding their robots 
capabilities (most likely acceleration and max speed, linear and 
angular). Please insert reasonable values when asked. The OCs and TCs 
reserve the right to ask for some kind of proof (e.g. logs of previous 
competitions or video recordings) if the values seem out of the 
ordinary. In order to give us some time to check these values, while 
also giving teams the option to finish building their robots the same 
way they would do for a normal competition, we will send the survey 
approximately one month before the competition starts.


Although all teams stated they could make their AI run in grSim, there 
was also quite a lot of feedback regarding non trivial issues in grSim. 
As there are many teams with their own simulator, we believe that now is 
a good time to design a common SSL-Simulator protocol 
<https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2FRoboCup-SSL%2Fssl-simulation-protocol&data=04%7C01%7Crobocup-small%40cc.gatech.edu%7C16ce2da59c534e8a56b308d8c3007326%7C482198bbae7b4b258b7a6d7f32faa083%7C0%7C0%7C637473754008322167%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000&sdata=ijz%2BlFJmkSfDKIX1stZLkKBRYhjtQz35ve9fwRjGxj4%3D&reserved=0>. We will 
implement this protocol in grSim soon and will use the protocol for the 
simulated competition this year, so please look at it carefully and send 
feedback if you have any issues with it. You can also add your own 
specific configuration commands for your simulator to the protocol by 
sending a pull request.

The new protocol will make it easier for teams to switch between 
different simulators and to implement new ones. It may also encourage 
others to share their implementations and makes it easier to hold more 
virtual competitions in the future, without depending on a single 
simulator implementation.


On that note, we would also like to know if teams want to offer their 
own simulator for the virtual competition. If you do, please send an 
email to the SSL mailing list announcing your intent before 20th of 
February 2021 along with the url to the code. Please note that for a 
simulator to be used for the competition, it must be open source in 
order to give every team a fair chance to test their implementation on 
specific simulations and to give feedback.

The exact setup that will be used during the competition will be ready 
mid-May, as can be seen in the timeline below:


Simulator Timeline

  *

    20th of February: Announcement deadline.

Every team that wants to offer their simulator is asked to announce so 
until this date

  *

    16th of April: Simulator development deadline

Every simulator to be considered for this year's competition has to be 
complete and published until this date. No new features are allowed to 
be published after this date. Teams that wish to offer their simulator 
are advised to publish early versions of it as soon as it is capable of 
communicating using the new protocol to get feedback from other teams. 
We will be keeping a list of all offered simulators on the website and 
advise all teams to test them regularly and report issues to the developers.

  *

    14th of May: Final announcement

The TC-OC will announce the final simulator to be used for the 
competition on 14th of May or earlier, also including all parameters 
that are going to be used during the competition.


Hardware challenges

We are not a simulation league and we don’t want to pretend to be one. 
So we are interested in doing something with our robots. Without 
universal access to a field for every team, we opted to do a seperate 
competition using real robots. There will be a robot based competition 
built out of the following four different challenges on a field that is 
at least 4x3m:

  *

    Passing: Teams have to complete as many passes longer than a given
    distance in a given time. The number of participating robots will be
    limited, and teams will not be allowed to pass back and forth
    between the same two robots.

  *

    Melee: A static defender in possession of the ball (i.e. the ball
    touches the static defender on its dribbler) is placed on the field.
    Teams are asked to use one robot to get the ball without pushing the
    defender, and score a goal, as fast as possible.

  *

    Freekick: The ball will be randomly placed on the field, as well as
    some static defenders. Teams are asked to score as fast as possible,
    using fewer than x robots while doing so.

  *

    Parkour/Dribbling: A robot of the participating team is asked to
    drive around static obstacles while keeping the ball in possession.
    The fastest team wins.

While these four challenges are certainly no replacement for regular SSL 
matches, we still hope they are a decent replacement for this year's 
special circumstances.

Please note that the rules for these challenges are still being drafted, 
including but not limited to exact scoring methods and exact procedure.


Technical challenges

We are planning to hold both technical challenges planned for Robocup 
2020 in a decentralized way this year. As a reminder, these are: the 
vision-blackout challenge for everyone, and the ball placement challenge 
for division B teams. As there is no division B this year, we will allow 
every team to participate in this challenge if they never signed up for 
a division A competition before 2021 (so every team participating in 
division A in Montreal, Sydney or every team signing up for division A 
for 2020 is not allowed to run).


The rules for these challenges will not suffer significant 
modifications, but they will be adapted to be performed in labs, so 
expect minor changes compared to 2020.



Participation Intent

With a more established competition structure, we now would like to ask 
teams to announce their participation intent as stated here 
<https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fssl.robocup.org%2Frobocup-2021-qulification%2F&data=04%7C01%7Crobocup-small%40cc.gatech.edu%7C16ce2da59c534e8a56b308d8c3007326%7C482198bbae7b4b258b7a6d7f32faa083%7C0%7C0%7C637473754008322167%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000&sdata=t6JkXdPw5n4PCzsNhAXgnE64006rNzGhTWlD6dBD2V4%3D&reserved=0>until 16th of 
February 2021.

Compared to the participation intent of previous years, teams can sign 
up for  A) The virtual tournament only  B) The robot based challenges 
only  C) Both


Teams are encouraged to sign up for the robot based challenges if they 
are interested and believe they will be able to find a field to play on 
until this June. It’s always possible to withdraw later and solely 
participate in the simulation. Greetings, Tobias Heineken,

RoboCup Small Size Organizing Committee


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailman.cc.gatech.edu/pipermail/robocup-small/attachments/20210127/a2025ebe/attachment-0001.html>