-- Prof. Dr. Alexander Ferrein Mobile Autonomous Systems & Cognitive Robotics Institute Robotics and Foundations of Computer Science FH Aachen - University of Applied Sciences Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology Eupener Strasse 70 | 52066 Aachen | Germany T: +49 241 6009 51904 | F: +49 241 6009 52190 E: f*****n@fh-aachen.de | W: www.ferrein.fh-aachen.de Speaker Major Competitions of the RoboCup German Regional Committee W: www.robocup.de Former Vice-Chair of the African-German Network of Excellence in Science A Network of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation W: www.agnes-h.org RoboCup Regional Committees =========================== A sufficiently large number of teams, researchers and teachers from any nation, group of nations, or nation-sized region (henceforth "region") with significant past and current RoboCup participation is invited to form a "RoboCup Regional Committee.” The purposes of these committees are to 1) Promote RoboCup within your region. 2) Organize local RoboCup events and RoboCup opens. 3) Manage qualification for RoboCup leagues when slots are limited. 4) Maintain RoboCup standards for scientific research and education within your region and uphold the RoboCup mission of sharing advances through friendly competition. 5) Maintain an English website to be linked to the main RoboCup website describing the RoboCup activities in your region. There are local events smaller than regional "open" competitions, which should also be run with regional committee participation, but must be approved by the board of trustees. For each such local event and open, regional committees may at some time in the future be asked to collect a standard RoboCup Federation registration fee from participants and send the resulting funds to the federation (details to be announced if/when this policy goes into effect). The regional committee is also expected to send a report following each event summarizing the participation and organization of the event, including how many people and teams participated, from where, etc. If there are many local events in a given year, they can be grouped together into a single annual report. Each regional committee should have a single chair who serves as the main point of contact with the RoboCup Board of Trustees for questions that are relevant to the region. There should be representation on the committee from all of the different RoboCup leagues in which your region is active (including RoboCupJunior). If not already established, we encourage the regional committees to initiate formation of all aspects of RoboCup activities, including RoboCupSoccer, RoboCupRescue, RoboCupJunior, and RoboCupAtHome. To form a committee, please get together with all of the participants from your region. Once the list of committee members is prepared, please contact the RoboCup Trustees to let us know: 1) The members and affiliations of the committee. 2) The names, affiliations, and email addresses of all the teams represented by the committee (hopefully all the teams from your region). 3) The URL of your current webpage, if it already exists (see http://www.robocup.org/organization-of-robocup/regional-committees/(http://w...) for some examples). The Trustees will then check that all the represented teams agree to be represented in this way, and then link the committee to the RoboCup website. The representatives of all RoboCup Regional Committees meet at least once a year during the annual RoboCup event to discuss with the Trustees about the development of RoboCup in their regions and in general. Furthermore, while vacancies exist in the Board of Trustees, one appointment is reserved for election by the regional committees (one vote per regional committee).