<div dir="ltr"><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">Call for Participation</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">RoboCup 2014 Rescue Simulation League</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">
Agent, Infrastructure and</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">Multi-Agent Challenge Competitions</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">July 19-25, 2014 (Joao Pessoa, Brazil)</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><a href="http://www.robocup2014.org/" target="_blank">http://www.robocup2014.org/</a></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"> </div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">
<br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">The RoboCup Rescue Agent Simulation league is inviting interested teams to apply for participation at the RoboCup 2014 competition in Joao Pessoa, Brazil.</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">The Rescue Simulation league will be held in three classes: Agent, Infrastructure and Multi-Agent Challenge.</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">
If you are interested in participating, please pre-register your team.</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">1)Agent Competition</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">-----------------------------------------------------------------</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">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.</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">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. </div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">2)Infrastructure Competition</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">------------------------------------------------------------------------</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">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.</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">Teams and participants should focus in the following scopes:</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">
<br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">1. A contribution to increase the future number of participants;</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">2. A contribution to Provide agent developers kit(New for 2014).</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">3. An integration of Agent and Virtual Robot competitions;</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">4. Improvements for server’s stability;</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">5. Improvements for sub simulators.</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">
DUTY OF RELEASE</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">In addition to the submission of a Team Description Paper (TDP), the teams interested in participating in the Infrastrcuture competition are required to provide also a schedule for releasing their source code. The final release date in this schedule must not after the competition date. Even though a team is accepted to participate in the competition, if it does not release the code before the competition as scheduled, it will not be allowed to present its tool in the Infrastructure competition day, and thus it will not be evaluated and considered for winning the prize.</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">3)Multi-Agent Challenge</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">----------------------------------------------------------</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">RoboCup Rescue 2014 Multi-Agent Challenge</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">
<a href="https://github.com/RMASBench/RMASBench" target="_blank">https://github.com/RMASBench/RMASBench</a></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">
Entries are welcome for the 2014 RoboCup Rescue Agent challenge</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">to be held in conjunction with the RoboCup 2014.</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">
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.</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">The goal of the challenge is to provide scenarios relevant to large-scale</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">
urban search and rescue (USAR) and disaster mitigation.</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">These will include performance metrics to assess technologies in the areas</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">
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.</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">CHALLENGE FORMAT</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">The competition will include several tasks run within various scenarios.</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">Teams are encouraged to participate in as many tasks as possible.</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">Each task will be designed by a simple interface that does not require</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">implementing the full agent solution as needed for the main competition.</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">This interface could be, for example, a simple function call for assigning</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">agents to targets given utilities computed beforehand.</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">Winners in each of the individual task as well as an overall winner</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">will be announced. The overall winner receives an official RoboCup Rescue challenge award.</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">Teams have to hand-in beforehand their Team Description Paper (TDP) that should explain the team's methods for addressing the announced tasks.</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">CHALLENGE TASKS</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">Envisioned tasks are, for example, the distributed and centralized</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">assignment of agents to targets. These targets could be either fires</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">to extinguish or buried civilians to rescue.</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">The challenge in this task is to distribute agents among the targets</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">in that to minimize the overall damage, i.e., either reducing the number</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">of burning buildings or increasing the number of rescued civilians.</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">Another task will be the efficient planning of multi-agent routes</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">given the problem of unknown blockage of roads, also known as the</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">Canadian Traveler Problem.</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">
<br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">More details can be found on the web page at</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><a href="https://github.com/RMASBench/RMASBench" target="_blank">https://github.com/RMASBench/RMASBench</a></div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"> 4)Pre-registration</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">-----------------------------------------------------</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">For the pre-registration you need to send an email to <a href="mailto:faraji.farshid@gmail.com" target="_blank">faraji.farshid@gmail.com</a> with the subject '2014 Pre-registration TEAM_NAME'. </div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">The E-Mail should contain the following information:</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">
1. Team name:</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">2. Team leader:</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">3. Email address:</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">
4. Institution:</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">5. City and country:</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">6. Estimated size of team: </div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">
7. Competition you want to enter:</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"> [ ] Agent competition</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"> [ ] Multi-agent challenge (See call for participation below)</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"> [ ] Infrastructure competition</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">The pre-registration deadline is January 31th, no qualification materials are required at this stage. A list of pre-registered teams will be published regularly at <a href="http://www.roborescue.sf.net/" target="_blank">http://www.roborescue.sf.net</a></div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">5)Qualification</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">--------------------------------------------------------------</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">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 14th.</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">
6) Important Dates</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">-----------------------------------------------------------------------</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">Team Pre-Registration Deadline: January 31th, 2014</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">Deadline for qualification materials: February 14th, 2014 </div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">Team Qualification Notification: March 10th, 2014</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"> </div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><p class="MsoNormal" dir="LTR" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;direction:ltr">
<span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif">Best Regards,</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" dir="LTR" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;direction:ltr"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" dir="LTR" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;direction:ltr">
<span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif">Farshid Faraji</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" dir="LTR" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;direction:ltr">On Behalf of Organizing Committee<br>RoboCup 2014 Rescue Agent Simulation </p>
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