In the current rules the only form of allowed communication is Verbal
Teams may not use any type of communication, excluding verbal communication, with robots in play, in service or with robots serving their 30 seconds penalty time that contains information which reduces the need for autonomy in detecting the current game state of the robots, including the position of the ball, the location where the robot re-enters the Field, the orientation of the robots own or opponents goal, and the position of team members or opponents. In case of doubt that a team violates this rule, the code must be made available to members of the Technical Committee for inspection.
In real soccer, coaches often use gestures to signal information to the players.
I would like to see that we allow the Robot handlers to communicate to the players using such gestures.
From my point of view, if we consider the coach, we should consider a robot coach (as it has recently been introduced in the SPL).
I rather see the current phrasing as a way of making clear that we do not forbid people from the team to shout “Shoot! Shoot!” when their robot is in position to score a goal.
I have not seen any team trying to use speech recognition during game (quite difficult due to the background noise on my opinion). Using gesture recognition would be much easier I think.
On the same page, I would not forbid people to jump out of excitement when their robot is about to score a goal, but I am not in favor of seeing people chaining complex gesture to reduce the need for autonomy of robots.
I would rather remove the ‘excluding verbal communication’ than add the ‘gesture communication’
I agree that there could be a problem with people using complex chains of gestures to communicate much information to the players. Maybe we could find a rule which limits the communication to something similar to a soccer coaches with his or her players.
I do not think a robot coach is a good idea since this would take away from the autonomy since the robot coach can be used similar to a central vision system in the SSL.