Hello,

Since this year’s RoboCup is now about a month away, we want to give you some information regarding the SSL competition:

General Information

The time frame for the competition will be as follows:

Team Setup Days: Monday 15. - Wednesday 17. July

Competition: Thursday 18. - Sunday 21. July

Symposium: Monday 22. July

(From Monday to Saturday the venue will be open from 08:00 - 22:00 and on the last competition day it will be open from 08:00 - 19:00.)

We currently don’t have a timeframe yet, from when the various fields will be finished, but we would expect that you should be able to get your first time on the field on the second setup day.

The technical challenges will probably take place during the first two official competition days (18 & 19.).

In addition to that, we want to give you a quick heads up. The organizers of this year's tournament are currently planning to run it as paperless as possible. The result sheets for each game will continue to be in paper, but probably everything else will be digitized and sent out via E-Mail and Discord. Therefore we highly encourage you to monitor either of the information sources during the competition. We will announce all important information at the competition area as well, but due to people being out to eat, etc. we cannot ensure that everybody will hear that announcement.

Therefore, if you are not yet on the SSL mailing list, it would make sense to have at least one of the team members that are in Eindhoven on the small size mailing list: https://lists.robocup.org/mm/lists/robocup-small.lists.robocup.org/

Tournament Style

Since we have 9 teams in each division we will run the group stage in both divisions with two groups each. That means that we will have one group of 4 teams and the other one will have 5. The knockout stage will be played in a double elimination stage. Due to the fact that we are going to have three Div B fields this year, the Division B will start the knock-out stage with 8 teams, whereas the Div A can only start with 6 teams.

The teams will be drawn into groups using the SSL grouping tool (https://github.com/RoboCup-SSL/ssl-grouping). We already updated the seeding pools for this competition. Seeds are determined primarily by the results in last year’s competition (https://ssl.robocup.org/robocup-2023-results). If you notice any issues with this seeding, please notify us before the 24th of June. This is important since we will draw groups on that day and we have a much harder time adjusting the seeding when the resulting groups are already available.

As we always do, we will use random.org for the random seeds required for the tool.

We will draw the groups using the pre-generated random numbers for the 24th of June (which will become available at https://www.random.org/integers/?num=4&min=1&max=10000&col=5&... on that date) to seed our tool: The first two numbers are for division A, the second two numbers for division B.

Technical Challenges

To help us plan this years technical challenge and have a first insight on how many team want to participate in each challenge, we prepared the following questionnaire: https://forms.gle/BCpdJbmHKra2A8q96

It takes less than 5 minutes of time and we would be happy if you could take the time and fill it out. The survey is not mandatory or obligatory, it is just used to get a first idea of the required timeframe.

The official deadline to register for this year's technical challenges will be the 15. July at 20:00 o’clock CEST (Eindhoven local time).

Referee Quiz

To be allowed to fill in one of the impartial roles (assistant / main Referee, Game Controller Operator, Vision expert) during the official matches, you need to complete this year's referee quiz before the first competition day: https://forms.gle/8VyNqHXWBQkdF2QL8

Since all teams will need to take turns in filling in the impartial roles, if not at least two members of your team completed the quiz, your team could be excluded from the competition.

Open Source Award

Since every year most teams use a considerate amount of time to evaluate the submissions of the other teams, we decided to change the voting process this year.

Since it was quite difficult in the recent years to come up with one numerical score for each category for each team, especially if the team had multiple projects, each team participating in the Open Source Award will need to pick one project for their submission. As a guidance for the rating, from this year on you can choose from different prepared sentences per category and pick the one that most closely represents the submission in that category. For example in the category Quality of Submission the options you can pick from, would be as follows:

-

We want to use the submission as an important part in our regular gameplay (3 Pts)

-

We want to use the submission as part of our testing routine or other regular SSL activity (2 Pts)

-

We want to use parts of the submission in our gameplay (2 Pts)

-

We want to study the submission or parts of it to learn about the solution and to improve our solution / approach (1 Pts)

-

We see no use of the submission (0 Pts)

These statements are meant as guidance, i.e., you will be able to add or subtract points if you explain why you did so. For example, if we think of Documentation, you could add for RoboTeam Twente’s TDP Search Engine the following additional statement: “Documentation is less important if the team offers the service in an easy-to-use form on their website (+1Pts)”.

Since we also want to help each team participating in the Open Source Award to improve their submission in the future, from this year on we will send out an anonymous summary for each team after the competition, that shows how your submission got rated in comparison to the other teams. In addition to the rating the section for each team's submission will also include a small text field, so that you can highlight the most important feature from the submission or give feedback on what the team could best improve. The feedback from this field will also be anonymized by the committee and then passed on to the team, so that they can use the feedback to improve their future Open Source contributions.

The official submission deadline for this year's Open Source Award will be the 15. July at 20:00 o’clock CEST (Eindhoven local time).

If you have any open questions, feel free to reach out to the OC/TC,

See you in Eindhoven!

David,

in behalf of the SSL committee