RoboCup community,
I'm very excited about RoboCup getting started. Some of the leagues are already underway, and the rest will be starting in the next couple of days.
While fine-tuning your code and preparing for the competition, I hope you'll all take the time to also interact with each other - learn about the approaches other teams are taking, share your own advances, catch up with friends from past years, and make new friends - both within your leagues and across leagues. As usual, each league is expected to have league meetings to go over the rules, brainstorm changes for next year, and elect technical committees for next year.
To help that happen, we've prepared gather.town environments for you to join, with separate rooms for each league and booths for our sponsors - please visit them! Registered participants can log in on the underline site and then navigate to "RoboCup Lounge" in the left panel to get there.
These can be used for informal meetings, league meetings, or however you wish - you should be able to join any time (some leagues are using other platforms for such meetings, which is also fine - please follow the instructions of your own organizing committees).
I'm mainly writing now to ask everyone to mark your calendar for the opening ceremony and first symposium invited talk on Wednesday:
June 23rd ========= UTC 13:30 - opening ceremony - Underline mainstage UTC 14:00 - invited talk by Dieter Fox - Underline mainstage UTC 15:00 - community gathering - Gather.town
Before then, please make sure that if you've registered, you are able to access Underline and successfully join our Gather.town.
I look forward to seeing you all soon. And good luck to all your teams!
Best, Peter Stone President, RoboCup Federation