Dear Humanoid League Teams,

The newly elected Technical Committee of the Humanoid League had their first meeting two weeks ago and as part of this, we decided to keep the newsletters that we introduced last spring to keep you updated about the developments in the league and organization of the upcoming tournament(s). For now, we will send the newsletter on a monthly basis.

Call for Participation and Submission Process for RoboCup HL 2022 -----------------------------------------------------------------

In the past years, we have sent out the first call for participation at the beginning of October. This year, however, we are still waiting for some details about the next RoboCup competition to be confirmed, which is why the first Call for Participation will be sent out a little later this year. But don’t worry, there will be a RoboCup Humanoid League 2022 competition in one way or the other for sure!

At the moment, we are hoping to follow a similar timeline to the previous years, which would entail the initial submission deadline for teams in December and a notification of acceptance or a request for further material in January. The final submission of the updated material is planned for February. The Technical Committee does not foresee any changes in the submission procedure to the 2020 Calls for Participation, so please have a look at them for further information [0][1].

Future of the Virtual Humanoid Soccer Competition -------------------------------------------------

After the great success of the virtual soccer competition during the last world championship, we would like to use the opportunities the Webots simulator and the AWS infrastructure give us to keep the Humanoid League community connected throughout the year as well. At the moment, we are working towards setting up a virtual champions league with 10 games for every team played over a period of five months. Details and the exact start date are still depending on further logistical investigations, but at the moment we are considering a start at the beginning of December. The rule book will be similar to the one used in the last virtual tournament. However, we aim to have more variability in the virtual environment, e.g., by adding variation to the light source and ball texture. More information and a call of participation will be shared as soon as possible!

We need you! Help for Virtual Humanoid Soccer Competition Needed ----------------------------------------------------------------

While we are committed to organize a virtual champions league and improve the virtual environment and AutoReferee system, we can’t do this alone. As the main responsibility of the Technical Committee is the organization of the next world championship, the application process as well as the rule and roadmap development, we need support with the virtual league. In particular, there are three projects that support is needed for:

(i) AutoReferee and Simulator development: Apart from fixing remaining bugs and inconsistencies in the AutoReferee, this project also entails optimizing parts of the code and working on future extensions, like domain randomization.

(ii) Competition Infrastructure: To run the virtual tournament, a large number of bash and python scripts were developed last spring. The aim of this project is to make the existing scripts more uniform and robust and simplify the setup and execution of the virtual tournament.

(iii) Organization: Running a virtual champions league does not only require the technical infrastructure to be in place, there is also a number of tasks around scheduling, streaming, commentating, communication with teams, and making the results available.

If you are interested to join any of the project teams, please get in touch with Jasper (e-mail: j****r@bit-bots.de or Discord: Bitbots_Jasper#5358). The first meetings will be scheduled in week 42/43, so please get in touch before October 11th if possible. You are, of course, welcome to join any of the groups later as well, but to get the virtual champions league started we will need helping hands as early as possible.

TC Meeting Minutes ------------------

If you are interested to read more about the work of the Technical Committee and the decisions we are taking, you can always find the latest meeting minutes on the Humanoid League forum [2]

Contributing to the Newsletter ------------------------------

If you would like us to include anything in the next newsletter, please let us know. The deadline for sending in topics is always the last day of the previous month. That means you need to send us topics latest by October 31st if you would like them to be included in the November newsletter.

Cheers, Maike (for the Humanoid League Technical Committee)

[0] https://humanoid.robocup.org/hl-2020/humanoid-soccer-competition/call-for-pa... [1] https://humanoid.robocup.org/hl-2020/humanoid-research-demonstration-2/human...

[2] https://hl.forum.robocup.org/c/robocup/minutes/25