RoboCup championship 2019 - Meeting Minutes

Team Leader Meeting 02/07

  • Fields
    • AdultSize:
      • Goal area is 5cm too small
      • Penalty marks were wrong, are just re-painted
    • Kid/Teen:
      • Field C is still missing the goals, they will come soon
    • No camping on the fields!
      • One robot and one laptop per person
      • No need to remove shoes, but don’t walk on the field lines
    • Field reservation sheets are on the tables (will be updated every morning)
    • Check the natural light field
    • Official balls stay on the field at any time
  • Make sure you know where the next fire extinguisher is!
  • GameController
    • Will be installed on the fields later tonight
    • If you don’t see your logo, provide it to the OC
      • USB Stick
      • E-mail
      • github
    • IP addresses will be printed out later tonight
    • If you find any bugs, please let us know as soon as possible
    • As always, no personal Wi-Fi access points!
  • Robot Inspection
    • July 3rd all day
    • Sign-up sheet on the whiteboard
    • Teams are required to provide an assistant referee helping with the inspection
      • Assignment sheet is on the whiteboard
      • Come 10 minutes before the assigned time!
      • Robot is confiscated two hours before the next game for one hour if referee duty is missed
  • Sign-up sheet for Technical Challenges is up on the Whiteboard
    • Deadline 4th of July 1 PM
  • Robotis Pizza!
    • Tomorrow afternoon
    • Provided outside
    • Coupon required, you can pick it up at the OC table tomorrow
  • Mistake in the AdultSize Drop-In drawing was fixed
  • Game plans and results will be up on the website as usual
  • Prayer Room on the 3rd Level
  • Announcement of game plans and game schedule
  • Group drawings (results are published on the humanoid website)

Team Leader Meeting 03/07

  • Drop-In games: voting on proposal to use arithmetic mean instead of accumulated points
  • We will have a Best Referee award again, nomination list is on the OC board
  • Late inspections
    • All robots that are not certified have to come for inspection tonight
    • For re-inspections, announce at least an hour before the game
  • Update on Test & Tag: You are still allowed to use your equipment even if it has not been tagged
  • Please do not step on the field lines to make sure they last longer
  • We’re streaming selected games life on Twitch this year
  • Sunday at 7am there is a television recording of a demo game – looking for volunteers to participate in it
  • Girls Tea Party - spread the word!

Team Leader Meeting 06/07

  • All participants must be packed up and all personal belonging must be removed from the halls by 18:00 tomorrow night. Participants will not be allowed back into the halls after 18:00.
  • If your freight has been organised by Schenker, please liaise with Adam (from Schenker) located in Organiser Office 3. If you have not used Schenker and your freight will be picked up on Monday please place this at the back of Hall 2.
  • Award Ceremony
    • Absolutely no flags during the award ceremony
    • When the league is announced, form a line right away so there is no delay
  • Attendance lists are only printed on request (see registration desk)
  • 14:30 Best Referee Voting (before KidSize final)
  • KidSize semifinal: Check the OC board for referee assignments
  • TC results will be announced later tonight (you can find them on the website)

Rule Discussion

Topic: Add a penalty box, include penalty kicks?

  • Problem: Too many penalty kicks might slow down the game
  • Suggestion: Suspend the penalty kick, maybe have a free kick instead but from the penalty mark?
  • Having more lines (when adding the penalty box) would help the localization
  • Our lines are currently not too scale, so for Kid and TeenSize the field could be too small right now
  • Proposal to revise the size of KidSize and TeenSize goal
    • It’s not just the size of the field but also the size of the robot that is important for the goal height
    • Would a smaller goal make the goal keeper more active? Could go both ways
  • Takeaway: Size of goal area and goal itself should be revised so it looks more reasonable and encourage an active goal keeper.

Topic: Suspending TeenSize in 2020

  • Proposal to merge TeenSize in Kid and AdultSize league
  • KidSize minimum height will not be raised

Class A/ B division

  • Moving between the two classes might be quite challenging
  • Proposal: use Drop-In games for seeding
    • Is there a better way to measure the performance of the robot, because there seems to be a lot of randomness in the results
    • Most of the teams playing in the QF in KidSize are actually among the top 8 teams in Drop-In
    • If we move towards having Drop-In in the beginning next year, it would be only one robot required in the beginning
  • Having judges instead of the simple metric we have right now for Drop-In?
    • Might be too subjective
  • Can we use last year’s result for seeding?
    • Maybe both last year’s result and Drop-In seeding, 4 and 4?
    • Last year’s results are a good indicator, but we should still allow teams to advance

Topic: Number of fields

  • Drop-in back to back -> problems with charging batteries
  • Too many games per day this year in general
  • Some of the problem were due to the small number of fields
  • Provide parts of a field for testing, half of a field maybe?
  • Allowing to reserve the entire field and longer field reservations?

Topic: Increase the field for KidSize?

  • Increase the field for Drop-In?
  • If we increase the field size, we should see passes and team play
  • Can we encourage team play more?
    • Give teams points for using communication?
    • Forcing team communication protocol?
      • Can we really afford to exclude teams? What would be the exclusion criteria?
      • Problems for teams with few people/low resources?
      • The idea has been around for a long tine and it seems a lot of teams have interest in that
      • What does implementing a protocol mean? How accurate does the data sending need to be
      • Making it mandatory can also mean to only allow a certain protocol format of sending data
      • A mandatory format would make measuring the roadmap goals easier
      • It should be easy to adapt the protocol to not kill the “creativity” of teams
      • The protocol we have should be improved

Topic: Technical Challenges

  • Push-Recovery:
    • More bottles should be available, especially heavier masses
    • It may also be time to replace it
      • Push recovery is still very relevant to RoboCup, why should we remove it?
    • Maybe we can come up with a better way of testing the balancing abilities of your robot?
    • Potential improvement: Have the weight moved by a motor instead of human to reduce error
    • It’s not exciting for audience
    • Are there other ways to measure the balance of a robot?
      • Balancing on a bongoboard?
      • Walking on a balance beam?
      • Berg balancing scale for the elderly (problem: might be pre-recorded animations manually optimized)
      • Really walking forward with the robot and have an area where it is hit and it has to stay within that area
      • Should still allow for capture steps
      • Hit the robot with a stick with a force sensor
      • Walk on uneven terrain instead of push recovery, for example putting something under the grass
      • Proposals should still be related to soccer
      • Look into literature that already exist (Eurobench for example)
  • Goal kick from moving ball:
    • Many successful trials with two robots, so two robots should be made mandatory
    • Is already implemented in the regular games (corner kick)
  • High Jump:
    • Is too straining for the robots, should maybe replaced
    • Was supposed to be a first step towards running robots
      • Is that really true? The first step would rather be to walk on uneven terrain
      • Landing is also very important, maybe there could be a landing challenge, jumping down from something (problem jumping forward doesn’t work yet)
    • Problem with current approaches: mostly static animation tuning - should involve motion planning, not keyframe motion
    • Could be more hardware oriented? Shift some emphasis
  • Proposal Add a real grass challenge?

Topic: Open Source

  • Teams should be enforced more strictly
  • Problem of commercial interest

Topic: Balls

  • Announcement of the ball was quite short before the competition
  • Random ball?
    • At least not known before the competition to encourage teams to develop their approaches more independent of a specific ball
  • Random ball and earlier announcement both difficult
  • Technical Challenge: Random ball challenge, encourage teams to bring balls for the challenge
  • If KidSize is merged with TeenSize, would they play with size 1 or size 3?
    • Size 2 is difficult to get, size 3 too big

Topic: Strategic usage of pick-up

  • Problem: Pick-ups still used too often strategically by teams without severe reason
  • Proposal: pick up for a robot just sitting on field shouldn’t be allowed anymore, it should stay sitting/laying around there
    • too many robots on the floor are hard to detect and dangerous as well
  • Alternative: longer penalty to dis-encourage teams to use a pick-up strategically for re-localization
  • Alternative: re-entry only during game stoppage
    • It gets easier for the referee if robots are only allowed to enter during game stoppage
    • Is not really nice for the audience if too many robots are absent
  • Encourage referee more to change the sides at which the robots go back in
    • Too difficult for the referees?
    • Assistant referee can also take the decision were the robot should go back in
    • Could disturb the game because robot handlers need to be running around too much
  • Waiting for the next game stoppage would be very harsh in adult size
  • Rules should not diverge too much from FIFA rules
  • Currently too many robot handler running over the field
    • Require robot handlers to run outside the field
  • Different penalty for robots taken out during stoppage of game?

Topic: Natural light

  • Natural light should be pushed further – bordeuax has covered area without walls, so natural light with wind condition
    • Logistic might be difficult because we need a lot of games there no matter what the weather is
    • Many teams had trouble already this year, natural light is a very difficult problem
    • maybe should be defined to not have shadows, since shadows are very difficult to handle
    • Teams with more advanced cameras have an advantage, might not be just software
      • same applies for other components, too

Other ideas

  • Penalty marker seem too close to the goal box, they should be positioned a bit further towards the center circle
  • Would be desirable to have a minimum width for the goal posts which is wider than line width
  • Center of mass is measured in the walking pose, which doesn’t make that much sense
    • Different tool to measure weight of robots
  • often lot of information missing in TDPs
    • make some survey to question teams about different parts to get beeter overview what teams are using
    • maybe advance the robot specification sheet
  • Ask champions about in depth system report
  • AdultSize Drop-In had too many Drop-In matches with too few teams

Team Leader Meeting and TC/OC Election 05/07

General comments:

  • Reminder on behavior/attitude/respect for teams/referees
  • Discussion of rule interpretation for incapable player

TC election

  • 26 team leaders were present and voted
  • Vote to close nomination: 26 in favor, no abstain, no against
  • Candidates get the chance to present themselves
  • Candidate and voting results:
    • Ludovic Hofer (Rhoban): 22
    • Reinaldo Bianchi (RoboFei): 18
    • Wang Hao (SYCU): 15
    • Sergey Semendyaev (Starkit): 11
  • The three persons with the highest votes will be suggested to the Trustees as the next board of TCs

OC Election

  • OC is confirmed as a team with nobody against and nobody abstaining
  • Ludovic Hofer will be Local Chair for next year