[robocup-worldwide] RoboCup 2020 Rescue Agent Simulation -- Call for Participation

[Farshid Faraji]

*Call for Participation*
*2020 RoboCup Rescue Agent Simulation Competitions*
*to be held at Parc des Expositions,*

*Bordeaux, France — June 23-29, 2020
**https://rescuesim.robocup.org/robocup-2020/
<https://rescuesim.robocup.org/robocup-2020/>*

*Co-located with the*
*RoboCup 2020*
*https://2020.robocup.org* <https://2020.robocup.org/>

IMPORTANT DATES

Pre-Registration……………………………....: February 22, 2020 (23:55 GMT)
Team Description Paper (TDP) submission.: February 29, 2020 (23:55 GMT)
Qualified teams announcement…………..…: March 10, 2020
Camera-ready TDP submission………….….: May 31, 2020 (23:55 GMT)
Tournament dates………………………..……: June 25-28, 2020

ABOUT ROBOCUP RESCUE AGENT SIMULATION LEAGUE

Natural disasters are major adverse events that cause large-scale economic,
human, and environmental losses. They are usually difficult to predict and
even more challenging to prevent from happening. These characteristics
demand disaster management strategies to be in place to mitigate damaging
consequences when a disaster happens.

The mission of the RoboCup Rescue Agent Simulation League is to promote
research and development in the socially significant domain of natural
disaster with focus on multiagent teamwork coordination and decision
support systems. The effective implementation of this mission is translated
into three main objectives. First, the league aims to provide a simulator
able to realistically represent natural disaster scenarios where response
rescue plans can be assessed. Second, it aims to define evaluation
benchmarks for response plans elaborated by policy-makers. Finally, it aims
to promote research and development by organizing competitions to stimulate
the exchange of ideas and experience between researchers and practitioners.
These aims are designed to help in the development of more sophisticated
and formalized response plans to effectively respond to natural disasters
and reduce the negative impacts on society.

The 2020 RoboCup Rescue Agent Simulation League is composed of three
competitions:

·         Agent Simulation

·         Infrastructure

·         Technical Challenge

COMPETITIONS

Agent Simulation Competition

This competition involves primarily evaluating the performance of agent
teams developed using the Agent Development Framework (
https://github.com/roborescue/rcrs-adf) on different maps of the RoboCup
Rescue Agent Simulation (RCRS) platform (
https://github.com/roborescue/rcrs-server). Specifically, it involves
evaluating the effectiveness of Ambulance, Police Force, and Fire Brigade
agents on rescuing civilians and extinguishing fires in cities where an
earthquake has just happened.

The Agent Simulation competition is composed of a preliminary round split
in 2 phases, a semi-final round, and a final round. Each round is composed
of a set of maps representing different scenarios used to evaluate and
score each agent team at each round. A single score is assigned to each
team per round.

In addition to the evaluation of teams’ performance on the maps, teams are
also evaluated based on a presentation of their implemented strategy. This
presentation aims to share the knowledge of the teams and improve the
academic research aspects of the league. Each team will have 20 minutes to
present their implementation and another 10 minutes for questions and
answers. The presentation will be evaluated by a panel of experts and these
evaluations will be incorporated into the score of the teams. The
presentation ranking will be considered as an additional map in the scoring
system of all rounds.

The teams participating in the Agent Simulation competition will
automatically participate in the Technical Challenge competition (see
description below).

Participation in the Agent Simulation competition requires the submission
of a detailed Team Description Paper (TDP) describing the strategies
implemented on the agents’ code.

Teams with the highest scores at the final round receive a prize.

Specific rules for participating on the RCRS competition are available
at *https://rescuesim.robocup.org/robocup-2020/
<https://rescuesim.robocup.org/robocup-2020/>*.

Infrastructure Competition

The Infrastructure competition involves the presentation of tools or
simulators related to disaster management issues already developed by the
participating team. The aim is to evaluate possible enhancements and
expansions of the RoboCup Rescue Simulation League environment (both the
agent simulator and frameworks and the virtual robot platform) based on the
new ideas and concepts proposed in these tools and simulators. The
evaluation will be done by a panel of experts and the winner chosen
accordingly to a set of factors related to the technical aspects of the
tool or simulator and the presentation. The winner tool will be selected
for further integration with the simulation platform.

The participation on Infrastructure competition requires the submission of
a detailed Team Description Paper (TDP) describing the tool or simulator.
In addition to the submission of the TDP, teams interested in participating
on the Infrastructure competition must release their source code as an
open-source project *PRIOR to May 31, 2020*. Even after the team is
accepted for participating on the competition, if they do not release the
source code before the agreed date, they will be disqualified and will not
be allowed to participate in the competition. Thus the team will not be
evaluated or considered for winning the prize.

Participant teams should address topics including, but not limited to



·         Improve the RoboCup Rescue Simulation to transfer the outcomes of
the simulator to the real world disaster situation.

·         Improvements to the Virtual Robot Simulator

·         Improvements to the Agent Development Framework

·         Increase the number of participants on the RoboCup Rescue league

·         Provide agent development kits that render easy the participation
of newcomers

·         Integrate the Agent and Virtual Robot competitions

·         Improve the RoboCup Rescue sub-simulators

Technical Challenge Competition

The Technical Challenge competition assesses the modularity of the teams’
implementation using the ADF. The participation to the Technical Challenge
will be compulsory to teams participating in the Agent Simulation
Competition because the teams are required to implement their code using
the ADF. Therefore, teams are not required to send a separate Team
Description Paper (TDP) to participate in this competition.

The Technical Challenge competition will select one specific ADF module (To
Be Defined) from the best three teams in the Preliminary round to use in
all participating teams. Each team will have their ADF module replaced by
the selected module of the best three teams and the team’s code will be run
in selected scenarios (all teams will run on the same scenarios). The final
team’s score will be the worst score among all runs.

The RoboCup Rescue Agent Simulation chairs will use the Sample Agent to
check the modularity of the selected module of the best three teams at the
end of the Agent Competition Preliminary round. If the module is not
exchangeable, meaning that it depends on specific information from the
team’s code, then the team will have the best scenario score of the
semi-finals disregarded. The next best team in the Preliminary round will
be assessed to share its module to replace the one disqualified.

PRE-REGISTRATION

Teams must register via the submission system available at
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=rcrs2020 no later than *February
22, 2020 (23:55 GMT)*. This pre-registration requires only to fill the “
*Title*” field and the name, institution, and contact information of all
team members. The “Title” field should be “Agent_[TeamName]” to participate
in the Agent Competition and “Infrastructure_[TeamName]” for the
infrastructure competition, where [TeamName] should be replaced by the name
of the team. The pre-registration does not imply that the team will be
evaluated to participate in the competition, please see the
*QUALIFICATION* section
below for further information.

QUALIFICATION

Teams must submit a Team Description Paper (TDP) (in English) for each
competition (Agent Simulation and Infrastructure), and the TDP should
elaborate the focus, ideas and recent advancements implemented by the team.
The TDP is limited to *16 pages* and must be electronically submitted as
PDF through the submission system available at
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=rcrs2020 no later than February *29,
2020 (23:55 GMT)*.

The TDP file name has to be “Agent_[TeamName]” for the Agent Competition
and “Infrastructure_[TeamName]” for the infrastructure competition, where
[TeamName] is the name of the team submitting the TDP. This format should
be also used in the “Title” field in the submission system
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=rcrs2020.

All teams should prepare their Agent Competition TDP and presentation
slides based on the templates available at
https://github.com/roborescue/rcrs-templates.

By the way, teams can use
https://www.overleaf.com/docs?snip_uri=https://github.com/roborescue/rcrs-templates/archive/master.zip
to prepare their TDPs online.

The Infrastructure TDP does not have a specific template.

All TDPs will be peer-reviewed by at least two PC members. The evaluation
criteria of contributions will be based on originality, quality, clarity,
and its relevance to the league’s aims.

The suggestions of the reviewers should be incorporated into an improved
version (i.e., Camera-Ready version) of the TDP. The camera-ready version
should be uploaded to EasyChair no later than *May 31, 2020 (23:55 GMT)*.

*GENERAL QUALIFICATION RULES*

There are several general rules specified by the RoboCup Federation on
which the qualification process and the tournament are based:

1.    One-Third-Rule: Only one third of the participating teams may come
from the same country. If more than one third of the qualified teams come
from the same country, the first one third (floor rounded) will be
qualified and the remaining disqualified due to this rule. If a team has
members from more than one country, all country counts. False country
statement results in penalty.

2.    One-Team-Per-Research-Institution: A university or research institute
may only qualify one team. If a team is affiliated with more than one
institution, all affiliation counts. False institution statement results in
penalty.

3.    Plagiarism-Penalty: If a team commits plagiarism, the team and its
members will be banned participating on the current and next year’s RoboCup
Rescue Simulation competitions. The term plagiarism comprises any use of
external knowledge without proper referencing, i.e., copying or using
thoughts, ideas, texts or language in general and presenting them as their
own. This applies for Team Description Papers as well as team code. All
kinds of licenses and copyright have to be respected. This applies to the
qualification process and the RoboCup tournaments. Please be aware that
when a team is found guilty of committing plagiarism it is disqualified and
banned at any time. This may also be in the middle of the tournament.

4.    No-Show-Penalty: If a team qualifies for the RoboCup 2020, but is not
able to come to the venue, the team is required to cancel its participation
ONE MONTH before the final registration deadline of the RoboCup 2020 by
sending an email to robocuprescuesim at gmail.com. This will give an
opportunity to the next qualified-ranked team to participate in the
competition. If a team fails to report it is unable to participate in the
competition (‘no-show’), the team and its members will be banned of RoboCup
2020 competition.

5.    Academic-Fairness-Rule: If any team breaches general academic
fairness in any other way, it may face penalties as well.

*QUALIFICATION RESULTS*

Qualification results will be announced on *March 10, 2020*.



Hope to see you in Bordeaux


Best Regards,

Executive/Technical/Organizing committee  of RoboCup Rescue Simulation
League
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailman.cc.gatech.edu/pipermail/robocup-worldwide/attachments/20200107/7432b9c1/attachment-0001.html>