Roadmap Update 2018

[Maike]

Hej there,

if you have any ideas or input for the roadmap update, please gather it either in this thread (if it's minor comments) or create your own thread under the Roadmap general topic.

Cheers,
Maike

[mmaximo]

Hi,

I am Marcos Maximo, president of team ITAndroids from Aeronautics Institute of Technology (ITA), Brazil. We compete in the Humanoid KidSize league. We have seen the discussion about updating the 2014 roadmap for the humanoid league. I have also seen that a workshop about this will happen in IROS this year. Unfortunately, we will not be able to attend this workshop.

Since the 2014 roadmap has been released, we have been planning ourselves to comply with the rules changes. Therefore, we kindly ask that the expected rules change are kept for the 2020 milestone. We have recently purchased servomotors aiming to build a new robot with 65 cm of height in order to comply with the minimum height requirement in 2020 declared in the 2014 roadmap. Since we have very limited research budget in Brazil, we will not be able to buy new servos to comply with a minimum height requirement of 80 cm in 2020, for example.

We believe that we should indeed make updates to the league roadmap. However, I think that most teams will need at least 5 years to plan for new rules changes, given that the hardware in humanoid league requires high investments.

Best regards,
Marcos Maximo
Professor - Computer Science Division - ITA
President of ITAndroids

[Ludovic]

I am sorry for answering so late, I just noticed this message.

The TC deeply understand your concern and we can assure you that modifications of the roadmap will not forbid teams to participate to the leagues. On the opposite, they are expected to be less restrictive than the 2014 roadmap.

We deeply understand the impact on developments and the costs which might be induced by rule changes. This is one of the reason why I would like the new roadmap to specify that changes which affect the design/number of robots should be announced more than one year in advance. Depending on the type of changes, I agree that even 2 years is a short time, specifically for rules which would forbid some robots to participate to the competition.

If you still have some questions or comments, do not hesitate to add it here.