[robocup-worldwide] ICAPS 2017 Robotics Planning and Execution Competition

[Tim Niemueller]

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  Planning and Execution Competition for Logistics Robots in Simulation
                     ICAPS 2017 - Pittsburgh, PA, USA
                http://www.robocup-logistics.org/sim-comp
      Release of Rules and Regulations and Reference Implementations
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Dear Planning and Robotics Community,

today, we release a first version of the rules and regulations of the 
Planning and Execution Competition for Logistics Robots in Simulation. 
The scenario is a smart factory with production logistics where three 
robots have to maintain and optimize a material flow. The competition is 
held in simulation. It is based on the RoboCup Logistics League (RCLL), 
which is held using actual robots (this year in Japan).

The simulation competition will be held during ICAPS 2017 (depending on 
the number of participants some qualifiers may be run ahead of the 
conference in June).

To give teams easy access and a quick start, we provide a fully 
integrated system using Fawkes based on the release of the Carologistics 
RoboCup team, which won the competition in the last three years. 
Additionally, we provide a principle reference implementation exposed 
through ROS including a ROSPlan domain integration, that can perform 
simpler tasks. However, competitors who want to use it are expected to 
modify and expand it to play the full game. Another platform based on 
MPEX (by MIT MERS group) is to be released soon. For rapid setup, we 
provide an image for a USB flash drive that allows to boot into a system 
that contains the pre-installed software and reference implementation. 
It can also be run in a virtual machine.

The current release is an alpha release and things might (and most 
likely will) change in the future. We will make every effort to minimize 
these changes. Details regarding the actual deployment during the 
competition will be disclosed by May 3rd.

The rules, the USB stick image, a video of the tutorial at ICAPS last 
year and further information is available at our website at
            http://www.robocup-logistics.org/sim-comp

Running this competition is a joint effort of Tim Niemueller (RWTH 
Aachen University), Erez Karpas (Technion Israel), Tiago Vaquero (MIT), 
and Eric Timmons (MIT).

On Thursday, April 6th 2017 at 19:00 UTC we will have an introductory 
webcast with a Q&A session. The details how to access the webcast will 
be posted later. We invite all interested teams to join us and make this 
our kick-off event for the competition preparation.

On behalf of the organizing committee,
   Tim Niemueller

-- 
KBSG -- Knowledge-Based Systems Group                       Robotics Lab
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https://kbsg.rwth-aachen.de                       RWTH Aachen University
https://robocup.rwth-aachen.de                           Ahornstrasse 55
https://www.fawkesrobotics.org                            D-52056 Aachen