[robocup-worldwide] DARPA Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2)

[April Foster]

Dear RoboCup Community,


DARPA is kicking off a new AI-focused competition, called the Spectrum
Collaboration Challenge (SC2).  SC2 is *the world's first collaborative
machine-intelligence competition to overcome spectrum scarcity*.  This new
DARPA Grand challenge, which champions a spectrum-sharing model for RF
communications, comes at a time of fast-growing demand for wireless
services, which could soon overwhelm the current, century-old practice of
assigning users exclusive use of specific frequencies.  Current spectrum
access strategies avoid complex decision making of how best to use the
spectrum by allowing only a single homogeneous type of radio to use a
particular frequency.  This practice, while simplifying the radio design,
results in a number of inefficiencies in the use of the spectrum.  SC2
seeks to foster an alternate approach which asks the radios to handle the
complexity of jointly optimizing spectrum use amongst a diverse group of
heterogeneous spectrum users.  This approach demands a new kind of radio,
one which is both collaborative and intelligent.


Many of the core technical challenges and required skillsets to tackle them
overlap well with the RoboCup Community.  For example, distributed decision
making, handling dynamic environments, and acting in real-time. Chief among
them however, is the unsolved core problem of collaborative decision
making, amongst a set of heterogeneous actors, towards a common goal.  This
is somewhat analogous to the concept of a “pickup game” in soccer.  Deciding
who is best suited for which position, how to coordinate your actions
towards the team objective, and adapt the ensemble in spite of their
different reasoning engines are all questions that apply directly to the
SC2 problem.


The competition will unfold in three year-long phases beginning in 2017 and
finishing, for those teams that rank among the best at the two Preliminary
Events, in a high-profile Championship Event in late 2019. The team whose
advanced, software-defined radios (an RF technology that provides the
necessary agility in changing waveforms) collaborate most effectively with
a diversity of simultaneously operating radios in a manner that optimizes
spectrum usage for the entire communicating ensemble will walk away with a
grand prize of $2 million. The teams that rank as the second and third best
collaborators will take home $1 million and $750,000, respectively.


The RoboCup community is strongly encouraged to get involved in this
competition. Your skills and knowledge are invaluable to tackling this
emerging real-world problem, with broad impact to our everyday lives.


All the details can be found on our website:
SpectrumCollaborationChallenge.com
<http://www.SpectrumCollaborationChallenge.com> or by contacting the SC2
team at: sc2 at darpa.mil.
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