Hi,
We are very sorry for the current delay with the RoboCup related announcements. But hopefully everything is finally figured out and we can therefore start to send you a mail every week. Therefore, if you have not already done it, it might now be a good time to join the [SSL mailing list](https://lists.robocup.org/mm/lists/robocup-small.lists.robocup.org/).
Radio Communications Challenge
To reduce the entry barrier for new teams, we want to provide a list of known good radio solutions. Therefore we want to encourage teams to open-source their solution and offer quantitative metrics on which the different solutions can be compared. The goal of this is not to seek one mandated solution, but rather help teams develop and implement reliable radio solutions to reduce the complexity and enhance the gameplay.
To get to know more about the challenge and how to participate, please take a look at the rules for the challenge: [HMTL](https://robocup-ssl.github.io/technical-challenge-rules/2026-radio-communica...)
SSL RCJ Soccer Junior Cooperation Challenge
As an experiment this year, we will also be hosting a joint Technical Challenge in collaboration with RoboCup Junior Soccer. For this challenge, participating teams will be randomly paired, combining one Major and one Junior team. Both teams will then need to work together to complete the challenge. Due to the nature of Technical Challenges in RCJ, the task and its ruleset will only be published at the start of the tournament. Therefore the evaluation will take place on Saturday. Although this is a normal competition day with matches taking place, we will do our best to ensure that the time of your evaluation slot does not conflict with any matches or the preparation time beforehand.
If you would like to participate in the challenge, please fill out the participation intent here: https://forms.gle/az63vys8jpErBj9e6 Filling out the form is not binding, but helps us optimize this year's schedule and the details of the challenge.
Rule Changes
In addition to the [new submission area in Div A](https://robocup-ssl.github.io/ssl-rules/sslrules-diff.html#_robot_substituti...) we sadly missed three minor rule changes in the last mail, where the wording or names got improved:
- [Robot Height:](https://robocup-ssl.github.io/ssl-rules/sslrules-diff.html#_shape) As the vision system cannot handle robots of the same team having too different heights, the requirement of them not differing by more than 0.02 m from each other was added. - [Renaming Emergency Stop:](https://robocup-ssl.github.io/ssl-rules/sslrules-diff.html#_forced_timeout)D... to misunderstandings caused by its name, the Emergency Stop has been renamed to Forced Timeout, with the functionality remaining the same. - [Vision Systems:](https://robocup-ssl.github.io/ssl-rules/sslrules-diff.html#_vision) To allow competitions to decide for themself which vision system they want to use at a tournament, the explicit wording regarding the ssl-vision project has been updated.
Available vision system(s)
As we are currently still in a transition phase between the [SSL-Vision](https://github.com/RoboCup-SSL/ssl-vision) and the new [vision-processor](https://github.com/TIGERs-Mannheim/vision-processor), the decision has been made that we will continue to offer SSL-Vision as default vision system on all fields for this year. In addition to that, we will also offer the vision-processor on the Div A field, as well as one of three Div-B fields. Nonetheless we currently plan to switch to the vision-processor as default for RC27 and probably will not offer the SSL-Vision system as a backup option there.
Therefore please make yourself familiar with the vision-processor until the end of this year's RC, as we would like to take the chance and speak about current hurdles regarding a vision-processor implementation at this year's Open TC/OC meeting and the roadmap for coming improvements.
In case of any questions regarding the included announcements, please feel free to contact any of us.
Thank you,
David and Will.
On behalf of the SSL OC and TC.