Call for proposals: RCF Project Support 2023

The RoboCup Federation (RCF) is pleased to announce this call for proposals to support activities for promoting the development of RoboCup Leagues.

RCF Project Support aims at funding activities for the development of the RoboCup Leagues or the promotion of RoboCup in general. The main goal of these projects is to research and develop activities that support significant advancements of the RoboCup leagues and/or the RoboCup community which are difficult to achieve otherwise. This includes support for short-term visits for a collaboration between teams (e.g. joint team development, integration of research agendas) and/or RoboCup camps on special or novel topics.

This year the RCF particularly encourages proposals in the following areas:

●    Human-Robot-Interaction (HRI), any type interaction of a human with a robot within one of the RoboCup leagues ●    Low-Cost Standard Robots, any ideas to lower the entry bar to a RoboCup league or to allow to scale the number of robots in a team ●    Unified Game Controllers, development of game controllers that can be shared between RoboCup leagues easily and with minor re-configuration ●    Data Sets from Competitions, any concept for automated collecting and annotating data (i.e. ground truth) from competitions in order to support statistical analysis or machine learning

Support

Support will be provided in the form of reimbursement upon receipts of direct expenses (e.g., hardware devices or costs for organization of events) or of a grant for the applicants. In case of hardware acquisition, it must be specified how the league (e.g. other teams) will benefit from this hardware.

A detailed list of expenses must be described in the proposal. Funds from RCF are limited, partial funding may be also considered.

Submission

A single PDF file should be submitted through the easychair system https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=rcfsupport2023 under the Category: Projects for League Developments

The proposal (MAX 4 pages) must include:

1. description of the project, 2. motivations and goals, 3. benefits for RoboCup and RoboCup leagues (not for a single or a few teams), 4. implementation plan and budget.

Evaluation

Application materials will be evaluated by a committee of RoboCup Trustees or RoboCup Exec members. The evaluation of the proposals will be based on (i) the quality of the proposed research; (ii) the research contributions of the applicants, particularly in relation to RoboCup; and (iii) the impact of the proposed plan on the advancement and visibility of RoboCup (e.g. high ranked publications).

A limited number of awards is expected to be assigned.

Deadlines

Submission Deadline:   November 30th, 2022

Notification:   December 18th, 2022

Completion of the project: Preliminary work expected to be presented during the RoboCup Symposium 2023, the project needs to be finished by end of 2023 and a final report submitted by January 2024.

Exceptions to this rule must be submitted for approval to the evaluation committee.