Dear Humanoid League Teams,

this January version of our monthly newsletter contains important updates regarding the application timeline for the Humanoid Soccer Competition, the rule voting process, the (delayed) start of the Virtual Season as well as a reminder to submit to the RoboCup Symposium and the Humanoid Research Demonstration.

Humanoid Soccer Competition 2023 - Application process ------------------------------------------------------ We are in the process of finalizing the meta-reviews and hope to be able to send out the first round of application evaluations by January 22nd. We are still waiting for some reviews from team members, so if you have been appointed as a reviewer by your team but have not submitted the reviews, please do so urgently. As in previous years, all teams will then get the chance to update their application material until February 13th. For the teams who are already accepted on January 22nd, this is optional. Teams who are requested to update their material have to follow the meta reviews in order to get accepted to the Humanoid League Soccer Competition.

Rule voting ------------ The rule voting will start tomorrow and teams will then have two weeks to vote for the 2023 rule changes. We will prepare a draft of the updated rule book and release this on Feb 10th. Teams will then get time to read and comment on the draft until February 24th. If no major updates are required, we are planning on releasing a final rule book for 2023 by March 6th.

Virtual Season -------------- Unfortunately, we need to postpone the start of the virtual season again as we are facing administrative challenges regarding the payment process. We hope to have them resolved within the next days and are confident that we can begin with the first game day February 3rd (docker pull time) and broadcast the first stream on February 5th. For more regular updates, please have a look at our Discord announcement channel.

Symposium --------- The RoboCup Symposium will be held in conjunction with the 2023 RoboCup competition in Bordeaux. The RoboCup Symposium covers a range of topics with relevance to areas of robotics and artificial intelligence. The submission deadline is April 16th, 2023. For more information, see: https://2023.robocup.org/en/symposium/

Humanoid Research Demonstration ------------------------------- The Humanoid Research Demonstration is still open for applications. You can find further information on our website: https://humanoid.robocup.org/robocup-2023/call-for-participation/ The research demonstration is an excellent opportunity for teams and other research groups that are not participating in RoboCup to showcase their research related to humanoid robotics. As this is event was newly established in 2020, we would appreciate if you could share our call with interested colleagues and spread the word.

Cheers, Maike (on behalf of the Humanoid League Technical Committee)