- RoboCup-small - lists.robocup.org

RoboCup Early Visa Invitation Letters
by 2024＠robocup.org 22 Jan '24

22 Jan '24

Dear RoboCuppers, We are very much looking forward to inviting all of you to Eindhoven, The Netherlands for RoboCup 2024! To allow more teams to join RoboCup 2024, we offer early visa invitation letters. Participants that require a visa to join RoboCup in The Netherlands may apply for an early visa invitation letter. This letter allows for making an earlier appointment at an embassy to request a visa, rather than only after completing registration. There are some constraints on who can receive a visa invitation letter. You can find the details, as well as the request form, on the RoboCup 2024 website: https://2024.robocup.org/?page_id=2998 We hope to see you at RoboCup 2024! Best regards, RoboCup 2024 Organisation 2024(a)robocup.org <mailto:2024@robocup.org>

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Changes for the Small Size League in 2024
by Tobias Heineken 17 Jan '24

17 Jan '24

Happy New Year! As we start the preparations for RoboCup 2024, we would like to inform the league of the main upcoming changes for this year's competition, based on the discussions from the last Open OC/TC meeting at the end of RoboCup Bordeaux. We also want to give the league a quick heads-up that the Team Qualification Material Submission deadline for this year's RoboCup is February 13th. The CMT for submitting the (E)TDPs is now open and more information can be found at the qualification website <https://ssl.robocup.org/robocup-2024-qualification/>. The (Updated) Qualification process Starting with RoboCup 2024, the SSL will limit the number of teams participating in the competition. With the expected field setup, this limit is 12 teams in Division B and 8 in Division A. If more space becomes available, more slots in Division B will open up. To determine the selected teams, the TC/OC will rank all based on their qualification video, initial TDP submissionand feedback given during the review process. The TDP will generally be given preference over the qualification video & review feedback. For Division A, the 8 slots available will be decided using the ranking system cited above. If not all slots of Div A are filled, the TC/OC will invite teams from Division B until all slots are used. For Division B, there will be 8 slots that will be filled using the ranking system and 4 slots that will be filled randomly. This will ensure that new teams will have a chance of participating in the competition. All teams that did not get a slot in Division A are considered for Division B. Qualified teams that are not invited according to this method end up on the waiting list, which again is sorted based on the ranking described above. The TC/OC will inform a team “You’re on the waiting list, your position is #2”. If a slot opens up, we will contact the teams in that order to find a team that is still interested in coming to the RoboCup. This is additional to the “qualified / conditionally qualified” system we are currently using. The requirements for (E)TDPs and Qualification Video will also not change. Remember that teams regularly drop out (“withdrawn”) or don’t get qualified (“not qualified”), so there is a realistic chance a team on the waiting list can get invited. If you are directly qualified and not on the waiting list, please notify TC/OC immediatelyif you wish to withdraw so we can start communicating with teams on the waiting list. Number of robots for Division A In Bordeaux, the number of robots for division A was 11 and only two teams managed to actually play with 11 robots. With that in mind, and also wanting to provide more opportunities for teams in Division B to join Division A, we are making modifications to the allowed number of robots in Div A. During thegroup phase, games will be played with 8 robots on each side unless both teams agree to play with 11. And during the knockout phase, all games will be played with 11 robots per team.We still want to incentivize teams to play with 11 robots, but we do understand that this can be hard, especially for teams coming from Division B. Rule changes One major upcoming rule change is regarding the robot substitution process. Currently, a robot substitution is almost free, and a team can use almost unlimited time to do such a substitution. In RoboCup Japan (2017) we started the automatic robot substitutions <https://robocup-ssl.github.io/ssl-rules/sslrules.html#_robot_substitution>, but in its current implementation, flagging a robot substitution has no consequences.This can lead to diverting the focus of the development from obtaining stable hardware, and can cause excessive downtime during gameplay. The rule change imposes some consequence to performing a robot substitution. We have not concluded our discussions, but are considering the following options (or a combination of these): * A time limit on the robot substitution (either similar to the timeouts, or individually for each substitution event) * Limiting the number of substitutions * Consequences after a certain amount of substitutions o Examples include losing a timeout, getting a yellow card, a free kick, etc. Please stay attentive to our emails for any more announcements of rule changes. Technical challenges We have planned some exciting technical challenges for this year! The details are not ready yet, but we would like to give an overview so teams can start preparing for them. Black & White Hulls We have received a lot of feedback that for the audience, it is hard to distinguish between teams since most teams use black hulls. Therefore, we are proposing a challenge in which teams will have to show how they will quickly change their hulls’ colors between black and white. Team vs. Team Passing Challenge We want to extend last year’s passing challenge to involve other teams! This year, the passing challenge will involve two teams, each one trying to pass the ball to themselves. We are excited to see some ball stealing action and what strategies teams come up for this! Please direct all inquiries to the Small Size League Organizing Committee: rc-ssl-oc(a)lists.robocup.org <mailto:rc-ssl-oc@lists.robocup.org> Thank you!

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RoboCup 2024 Small Size League Call for Participation
by Carla Cosenza 21 Dec '23

21 Dec '23

Hello! The Small Size League committee is glad to invite you to participate in the RoboCup 2024! Below you can find important information about the competition and qualification. Location and dates RoboCup Eindhoven 2024 Small Size League July 17-21, 2024 https://2024.robocup.org/ About RoboCup RoboCup is an international scientific initiative with the goal to advance the state of the art of intelligent robots. When established in 1997, the original mission was to field a team of robots capable of winning against the human soccer World Cup champions by 2050. About the Small Size League The RoboCup Small Size League is a part of the RoboCup Research Federation focused on multi-agent coordination and control. Teams currently compete in 11 vs. 11 soccer matches (6 vs. 6 in Div. B). The robots must fit within an 18 cm diameter circle and must be no higher than 15 cm. The robots play soccer with an orange golf ball on a green carpeted field that is about 12 m long by 9 m wide. About the qualification To qualify for the competition, each team must submit a Team Description Paper and a video by February 13, 2024. More information on the qualification requirements and processes are located on the website. Please direct all inquiries to the Small Size League Organizing Committee: rc-ssl-oc(a)lists.robocup.org Thank you! Carla Cosenza RoboCup Small Size League | Organizing Committee

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Call for Interest: RoboCup German Open 2024 - Small Size League
by Nicolai Ommer 20 Nov '23

20 Nov '23

Call for Interest: RoboCup German Open 2024 - Small Size League Location: Kassel, Germany Date: April 17 - 21, 2024 Website: https://robocup.de/german-open/ The German Open of the RoboCup - open to national and international teams - is scheduled to take place again in 2024. The event takes place from the 17th to the 21st of April 2024 at the Kassel trade fair. We want to attract national attention with strong media performance. 700-800 participants are expected. The event attracts many visitors every year, including students interested in technology, robotics and AI. If you are interested in participating in the Small Size League, you will greatly help us planning this event by submitting the following poll or by sending me a short message as soon as possible. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdG9kF5-ETsCbZ0hHP1LksOaf72MvGAXB6… Submission-Deadline: November 24th 2023 Best, Nicolai Ommer Regional Committee Chair of the Small Size League

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PhD scholarships @ Western Sydney Uni, Australia
by Oliver Obst 10 Aug '23

10 Aug '23

Dear all, We have a new round of PhD scholarships at Western Sydney, open for domestic and international candidates who can start next January. If you are interested to work with me in robotics, in particular around one of these areas: - robotic teams and learning of strategies, reinforcement learning, or real-time decision making - learning-based locomotion and whole body control for walking (biped or quadruped) robots - assistive robotics or have prior RoboCup experience please consider applying. Please check the criteria and apply on this page here: https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/schools/grs/scholarships/main_round_schola… If you do apply, make sure to contact me in advance. Cheers Oliver -- Oliver Obst, Associate Professor Centre for Research in Mathematics and Data Science Western Sydney University http://oliver.obst.eu/

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RoboCup Brazil Open 2023
by Patricia Vergara 27 Jul '23

27 Jul '23

Good morning! Registrations are now open for RoboCup Brazil Open 2023! The event will occur from October 7th to 12th at the* Salvador Convention Center in Salvador, Bahia*. Registrations can be made through the website: http://olimpo.robocup.org.br/. RoboCup Brazil Open is a large event that also includes the Brazilian Robotics Competition, the Brazilian Robotics Olympiad, and the Brazilian Robotics Exhibition. In addition, the following meetings will be held during the event: XV Brazilian Robotics Symposium XIV Workshop on Educational Robotics Thesis and Dissertation Workshop in Robotics Thesis and Dissertation Contest in Robotics IEEE Latin American Robotics Symposium All rules and challenges for each category are available on our website, as well as the updated registration fees and deadlines for TDP submission. >> Some categories will be in a hybrid format, allowing teams to participate remotely when necessary. >> All information is available on our website: www.cbrobotica.org and www.robotica.org.br ________________________________ Best regards, Robocup Brazil Team -- Patrícia Vergara Comunicação RoboCup Brasil (11) 9.8686-4993 (apenas whatsapp) www.robocup.org.br

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RoboCup 2023 Results
by Selina Zwerver 20 Jul '23

20 Jul '23

Hi everyone, We want to thank you all for participating in this year’s RoboCup! It was amazing to see you all again, and I hope you enjoyed the event as much as we did. With this email we would like to congratulate you all with your results. We know that it hasn’t been easy to work on your robots in the past years, but all of you made it to Bordeaux and were able to play some matches! Below are the results. Please let us know if we have made a mistake somewhere! Division A - Tournament Rank Team 1 TIGERs Mannheim 2 ZJUNlict 3 Immortals 4 KIKS 5 ER-Force 5 RoboDragons 7 RoboTeam Twente Division B - Tournament Rank Team 1 RobôCIn 2 luhbots Soccer 3 Ri-one 4 UBC Thunderbots 5 ITAndroids 5 RoboJackets 5 RoboFEI 5 RoboIME 9 The-A-Team 9 NAMeC 9 OrcaBOT 9 Sysmic Robotics Awards Excellence award TIGERs Mannheim Best (E)TDP TIGERs Mannheim Open source award RoboTeam Twente Chip Pass Technical Challenge First Place TIGERs Mannheim Ball Placement Technical Challenge First Place RobôCIn League photo We would like to remind everyone that the league photo can be found here <https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1-VW7KR5tBn-sR5t2CdVwUTIj3VUmU4rw> ! RoboCup 2024 For those of you who did not receive the news during the RoboCup, RoboCup 2024 will take place from July 17-21 in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. We will update you as soon as we have more information about, for example, the set-up dates. We hope to see you all there! Kind regards, Selina Zwerver RoboCup Small Size League | Organizing Committee

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RoboCup 2023 – Open Source Award Submission RobôCIn
by José Victor Silva Cruz 05 Jul '23

05 Jul '23

Hi, everyone! We are proud to announce a series of repositories that we plan to submit at this year's open-source. Hopefully they will help grow our category here at RoboCup. RobôCIn's Plans for Future Software Development *rSoccer*: https://github.com/robocin/rSoccer - Is an open-source framework to study Reinforcement Learning for SSL; - Related Documents: - Exploring Reinforcement Learning in Path Planning for Omnidirectional Robot Soccer - https://www.cin.ufpe.br/~tg/2022-2/tg_EC/TG_jvsc.pdf - DyLam: A dynamic reward weighting method for reinforcement learning policy gradient algorithms: - https://repositorio.ufpe.br/handle/123456789/46630 - Evaluation of time limits in reinforcement learning applied to robot soccer simulation - https://www.cin.ufpe.br/~tg/2020-2/TG_EC/tg_jnds.pdf *project-unification*: https://github.com/robocin/project-unification This project aims to demonstrate the use of the soccer-common framework ( https://github.com/robocin/soccer-common), developed by RobôCIn and used in the RoboCup SSL and IEEE VSS categories. Also, the repository serves as a starting point to the team’s new developers and teams that want to start strategies on SSL. Usage examples: - MatheusPaixaoG: https://github.com/MatheusPaixaoG/project-unification - matheuslafayette: https://github.com/matheuslafayette/projeto-seletivo-robocin - agaf2: https://github.com/agaf2/project-unification - acrucha: https://github.com/acrucha/project-unification - caiomvfc: https://github.com/caiovmfc/Seletiva-RoboCin-VSS-cvmfc *robocin-cpp:* https://github.com/robocin/robocin-cpp - It is a library heavily inspired by abseil owned by Google, and seeks to extract what worked well from soccer-common, implementing software engineering best practices and modern C++ with a README-by-folder based documentation. It provides the core library for our next team's robotics applications. - Floating-point comparison; - Angular/geometric operations; - In the long term it will be like libsrc in 2D for our team. *protocols:* https://github.com/robocin/protocols The protobufs used by the competition are widely dispersed in the repositories that require them, making it necessary to copy and paste the files that are currently being used in the category. Thus, the protocols used are highly duplicated in the RoboCup SSL softwares, but also in the team’s strategy softwares. In this context, we propose a single repository containing the protocols used by as well as installation guidelines for various programming languages, such as Java, C++, Python, etc. *robocin-ines:* https://github.com/joseviccruz/robocin-ines, https://github.com/uandersonricardo/robocin-ines-server, https://github.com/uandersonricardo/robocin-ines-webui robocin-ines provides a base framework for architecting robotic applications. This set of repositories comes as an optimization of our current software (ssl-unification), providing a microservices-based framework which: 1. Enables the use of different programming languages; 2. Uses the ZeroMQ framework to communicate services with latency below 1ms; 3. Defines a visualization on the Web, providing better development simplicity; However, this final structure is not yet finalized and, as a way to validate the technologies, scope, and robustness of the system, the SSL VAR was developed as an MVP of this repository. SSL VAR is a match recording system, which allows the viewing of the match in real time, as well as the analysis of past plays through replay at a given timestamp or according to a given event in the match, such as a foul, penalty, or goal. In this way, it allows the human referee to analyze a past play and check whether his decision and also the decisions of the automatic referees were correct or not. The ultimate goal of this repository is to provide a base structure for organizing new SSL teams using microservices, and to extend the life and maintenance of our current software. Best regards, RobôCIn.

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RoboCup 2023 - Open Source Award Submission RoboFEI
by João Victor Aguiar 05 Jul '23

05 Jul '23

Dear SSL community, RoboFEI would like to submit our hardware and software works for the open-source award. We are happy to say that we have released all the mechanics, electronics, AI, and firmware for this year. Regarding mechanics, the new robot's generation is fully released on our GitLab (https://gitlab.com/robofei/ssl/ssl-mechanics). The project aims for modularization that will help robot maintenance and assembly. In electronics, both the main and kick boards have been changed aiming for modularization, besides the fact that the team replaced the FPGA with an STM microcontroller to modernize our robot, and you can see everything here in the link (https://gitlab.com/robofei/ssl/Electronics_v2). Besides that, our new firmware is released on our GitLab too ( https://gitlab.com/robofei/ssl/Electronics_v2). About the software, our ongoing research of multi-robot path-planning is fully released on our GitLab (https://gitlab.com/leo_costa/RobotNavigation). Best regards, João Victor RoboFEI

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RoboCup 2023 - Open Source Award Submission ER-Force
by Mike Schmidt 04 Jul '23

04 Jul '23

Dear Small Size League. ER-Force would like to submit their current hardware and software framework as well as its autoref for the open source award. [1, 2, 3] A short summary: The hardware project reflects the current state of the ER-Force robots, i.e. the new robot generation used by our team during this RoboCup. The hardware is designed in EAGLE (electronics) and Inventor (mechanics). The electronics section contains prebuilt manufacturer files (Gerber) as well as schematics as PDF, the mechanics part is depicted in assembly drawings. The software framework reflects the open-source simulator as well as some low level algorithms such as our path planning. The software framework is written in C++ and Qt. Finally, our open-source projects include our well-known autoref, which is used by the league for many years. Best regards, Mike ER-Force [1] https://github.com/robotics-erlangen/hardware [2] https://github.com/robotics-erlangen/framework [3] https://github.com/robotics-erlangen/autoref

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