Dear RoboCup community,
I'm writing to share my excitement about RoboCup 2021, which will officially begin in just two weeks! (some leagues may start even sooner)
Many of you reading this message have been hard at work helping with the organization, and even more of you have been hard at work preparing your teams. As of now there are more than 300 teams registered, and about 1500 participants!
As you know, this year's RoboCup will be very different than in the past. But I'm very encouraged by the way all the leagues have found creative ways to make the best of a difficult situation - by using simulators, live streams, deploying robots in each other's labs, etc.
The organizing team and I are doing everything we can to make sure the event will be a great scientific and engineering challenge for all participants, that will advance research as always. And we're also doing everything we can to make it a great community meet-up.
To make that possible, we are working with Underline to prepare some plenary "main-stage" events including an opening ceremony, awards ceremonies, and a fantastic line-up of invited speakers (Dieter Fox, Jean-Paul Laumond, and Stefanie Tellex). We will also have a Gather.town space for league meetings, the symposium poster sessions, and other informal interactions. Gather.town will be available to registererd participants at all times. (Instructions on using Gather.town will be provided, but you may want to prepare by installing the app on your computer - that tends to work better than using it in the browser)
As always, each league is creating its own competition schedule, and the symposium will have a great lineup of papers and posters. As they become available, we'll keep links to the schedules on the Underline main page (to be released soon) and/or the event webpage: https://2021.robocup.org/home
Since this is the first time we're organizing RoboCup online, please bear with us if there are some glitches. We're counting on everyone to come to the event with a good spirit and to do your best to be flexible and help find solutions as needed.
Meanwhile, good luck with your continued preparations! We look forward to seeing you all at the opening ceremony in a couple of weeks.
Best, Peter Stone General Chair, RoboCup 2021 President, RoboCup Federation
On behalf of the whole organizing committee: https://2021.robocup.org/