<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=us-ascii">
<TITLE>Message</TITLE>
<META content="MSHTML 6.00.2800.1458" name=GENERATOR></HEAD>
<BODY>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>We generally support (or at least accept) all the
changes except for point 7 (6 bots per team).</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>As some other teams mentioned, we also think that
the field will become a bit too crowded. More importantly, increasing the amount
of robots each year might give a disadvantage to financially limited
teams. <SPAN class=962244623-14112004>We are trying hard to stretch our
current budget to build 5 robots, there is little chance for
6. </SPAN><SPAN class=962244623-14112004>We </SPAN>would have to use one of
last years' <SPAN class=962244623-14112004>ro</SPAN>bots as a
placeholder.<BR> <BR>Maybe a temporary rule like "if one of the two
competing teams has only 5 robots then the other team will also have to only use
5 robots" would help. However, we realize that this might not be considered as
fair for all the teams which actually managed it to construct 6
robots.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Furthermore, we also believe that the suggested
"energy consumption limitation" for 2006 is partly a step in the wrong
direction. For many teams, RoboCup is just as much an electronic/mechanical
engineering challenge as it is on the software side. The development of faster
performing robots should be encouraged and we believe that they should be used
to their fullest physical potential and not artificially limited. The goal
should not be to make them more similar to the physical performance of humans,
but rather to outperform it.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT><BR><FONT face=Arial size=2>We also don't think that these energy
limitations really offer that much of a new research potential since the
simulation league has had similar artifical limitations on their virtual
physical constraints for many years.<SPAN class=962244623-14112004>
</SPAN>Especially on the big field it is helpful to always run at maximum
performance in order to i.e. drive around the ball and stop it from getting out
of bounds. So please, let's leave artificial limitations of this kind to
simulation league.</FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Stefan Zickler, Mike Licitra</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>UB Robotics<BR>University at Buffalo<BR><A
href="http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/ubr/robocup.php">http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/ubr/robocup.php</A></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV></BODY></HTML>