At the moment, it is very intransparent for both the Technical Committee and teams participating in the Humanoid League to understand which team uses a code base and/or hardware (components) from another team.
We hence propose to add a section to the rule book which requires teams to clearly state:
- in their software description part of the application material what part of the code is based on another team’s code base. This needs to be declared for each software section individually. If the code of a team builds on another team’s code, they need to clearly state their own changes and contributions. Failure to acknowledge the usage of another teams software can lead to disqualifications (if major parts are build on other team’s software without announcing this) or can lower the score of future submissions to the Humanoid League
- Clearly state in their robot description whether their robots or major components are bought or used from another team or a company (this includes rebuilding robots based on open hardware models of other RoboCup teams). Again, modifications and a team’s own contributions need to be clearly marked.
- in case they decide to use software or hardware by another team after the qualification material has already been approved a team needs to write an e-mail to the Humanoid League mailing list.
By clarifying this more in the rule book, we hope to create more transparency and to help teams understand which other teams are building on their software stack or using their hardware models, as well as allowing teams to judge similarities between other teams participating in the tournament.