[robocup-worldwide] Call for Participation: RoboCup 2013 Rescue Agent Simulation League

[Farshid Faraji]

*Call for Participation*

*RoboCup 201**3** Rescue Simulation League*

*Agent, Infrastructure and*

*Multi-Agent Challenge Competitions*

*June **24**-30, 2013 (Eindhoven, The Netherlands)*

www.robocup2013.org**


The RoboCup Rescue Agent Simulation league is inviting interested teams to
apply for participation at the RoboCup 2013 competition in Eindhoven, The
Netherlands.

The Rescue Simulation league will be held in three classes: Agent,
Infrastructure and Multi-Agent Challenge.

If you are interested in participating, please pre-register your team.


 *1)    Agent Competition*
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The Agent competition involves scoring competing agent coordination
algorithms on different maps of the RoboCup Rescue simulation platform. The
challenge in this case involves developing coordination algorithms that
will enable teams of Ambulances, Police Forces, and Fire Brigades to save
as many civilians as possible and extinguish fires in a city where an
earthquake has just happened.

Teams have to individually achieve a score on chosen maps which represent
different situations (e.g., civilians and fires, major fire in one corner
of a city, blocked roads to refuges, damaged platoon agents, fire maps,
civilian maps where only fires need to be extinguished or civilians need be
saved respectively) and this will determine how they compare with other
teams. The teams with the highest scores in all the maps are then selected
to move up the various rounds of the tournament, which is composed of two
preliminaries round, one semi-final round and one final round.

*2)     Infrastructure Competition*
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Infrastructure competition involves evaluating tools and simulators for
simulating disaster management problems in general. Here, the intent is to
build up realistic simulators and tools that could be used to enhance the
basic RoboCup Rescue simulator and expand upon it. The best tools and
simulators will be evaluated by a panel and a winner chosen accordingly.
The best tools will be selected for further integration with the simulation
platform.

This year, teams and participants should focus in the following scopes:

1. A contribution to increase the future number of participants;
2. An integration of Agent and Virtual Robot competitions;
3. Improvements for server’s stability;
4. Improvements for sub simulators.

*DUTY OF RELEASE*

In the Team Description Paper (TDP), the team must describe a schedule for
release of their result. If the winner releases their result, the prize
will be sent to them.
If the team doesn't release it, we cancel the prize of infrastructure
winner.

*3)   Multi-Agent Challenge*
----------------------------------------------------------
  RoboCup Rescue 2013 Multi-Agent Challenge

  http://kaspar.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~rslb

Entries are welcome for the 2013 RoboCup Rescue Agent challenge
to be held in conjunction with the RoboCup 2013.
Participation in the challenge will consist of demonstrating efficient
algorithms for coordinating large teams of agents solving one or more of the
 pre-defined challenge tasks in the Rescue Agent simulation environment.

The goal of the challenge is to provide scenarios relevant to large-scale
urban search and rescue (USAR) and disaster mitigation.
These will include performance metrics to assess technologies in the areas
of distributed and centralized multi-agent task allocation, team formation,
and path planning. The challenge comes with an open source policy designed to
encourage collaboration and the dissemination of ideas and algorithms.

*CHALLENGE FORMAT**
*The competition will include several tasks run within various scenarios.
Teams are encouraged to participate in as many tasks as possible.
Each task will be designed by a simple interface that does not require
implementing the full agent solution as needed for the main competition.
This interface could be, for example, a simple function call for assigning
agents to targets given utilities computed beforehand.
Winners in each of the individual task as well as an overall winner
will be announced. The overall winner receives an official RoboCup Rescue
challenge award.
Teams have to hand-in beforehand their Team Description Paper (TDP) that
should explain the team's methods for addressing the announced tasks.

*CHALLENGE TASKS**
*Envisioned tasks are, for example, the distributed and centralized
assignment of agents to targets. These targets could be either fires
to extinguish or buried civilians to rescue.
The challenge in this task is to distribute agents among the targets
in that to minimize the overall damage, i.e., either reducing the number
of burning buildings or increasing the number of rescued civilians.
Another task will be the efficient planning of multi-agent routes
given the problem of unknown blockage of roads, also known as the
Canadian Traveler Problem.

More details can be found on the web page at
http://kaspar.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~rslb


* 4)   Pre-registration*
-----------------------------------------------------
For the pre-registration you need to send an email to
faraji.farshid at gmail.com  with the subject *'**2013 Pre-registration
TEAM_NAME'*.

The E-Mail should contain the following information:

1. Team name:
2. Team leader:
3. Email address:
4. Institution:
5. City and country:
6. Estimated size of team:
7. Competition you want to enter:
 [ ] Agent competition
 [ ] Multi-agent challenge (See call for participation below)
 [ ] Infrastructure competition

The pre-registration *deadline is **January 15th*, no qualification
materials are required at this stage. A list of pre-registered teams will
be published
regularly at http://www.roborescue.sf.net

*5)   Qualification*
--------------------------------------------------------------
For qualification, each team is required to submit a team description paper
(TDP) for each competition entry. Information about the submission
procedure will be sent to the pre-registered teams and to the mailing list
at a later stage. Qualification deadline is February 10th.


*6) Rule and Package*
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We will announce final rule and package by qualification deadline.



*7)  RoboCup Rescue: Communication Library*
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This library is a "Communication Library".
By using this library teams can share a part of their source code, easily.
This library provides the communication protocol between agents and center.
We recommend teams to use this library:
 http://sourceforge.jp/projects/rcrscs/releases/


*8) Important Dates
*-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Team Pre-Registration Deadline: January 15th, 2013

Deadline for qualification materials: February 10th, 2013
Team Qualification Notification: February 28th, 2013



Best Regards,


Farshid Faraji

On Behalf of Organizing Committee
RoboCup 2013 Rescue Agent Simulation
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