TC Meeting September 16th

TC Meeting: September 16th, 2021

  • Attending: Azer, Maike, Alessandra, Jacky, Reinaldo, Ludovic, Jasper, Reinhard
  • Missing:
  • Note taker: Ludovic

TC Organization for the upcoming year

  • General introduction into the work and time schedule for the Technical Committee
    • Main tasks of the TC usually:
      • Humanoid soccer competition (main responsibility)
        • October: Call For Participation
        • December: Applications with peer-reviews
        • January: Final decision on qualification
        • Autumn: Rules updates + Contact with LOC
      • Humanoid virtual soccer competition (also main responsibility now)
      • Other initiatives over the year (secondary)
  • Communication and organization
    • Notes of meeting published on the forum
    • Execs are usually receiving mails from trustees and forwarding to TC
    • Trustees related to the league are also on the mailing list (Oskar von Stryk and Daniel Polani)
    • Choice between Discord and E-mails for written communication
      • Some preferences for Discord (3), other for e-mails (3), abstain (2)
      • The proposal for changing to Discord is not approved
    • Which frequency of voice meetings?
      • Monthly meeting → agreed
      • Regular meeting on fixed date or doodle for every meeting?
        • Proposal: 1st Thursday of each month 1pm-3pm CEST-> Agreed

RoboCup HSC and Research Demonstration 2022 in Thailand

  • Status update from LOC
    • No updates from Pasan, he said he would be willing to act as LOC, Jacky will ask for update
  • Procedure and timeline for the Call for Participation (CfP) and submissions
    • Still no official confirmation that RoboCup is planned physically for 2022
    • Proposed procedure:
      • Maike: Wait confirmation from trustees that it should happen physically before having CfP, Ludovic, Alessandra and Jasper agree
        • Time for RoboCup 2022 is not published yet → problematic to announce the CfP
      • Jasper: Possibly update teams on state of the CfP (so they know we have not forgotten them)
      • Jacky: Even if its confirmed by trustees, there is still much uncertainty
      • Reinaldo: We say it will be virtual except if condition improves
      • Reinhard: GermanOpen options are still being evaluated
      • Azer: proposal to move the competition to Dubai
      • General Opinion: we can’t change the location of the physical competition, it’s not something that can’t even be discussed with respect to how the RoboCup is organized.
    • Comments
      • For RoboCupAsiaPacific, local teams compete physically and other teams compete virtually
      • Discussion over the option of having hybrid event
      • Several opinions for full virtual OR fully physical
    • Status of the organization is still unclear, it is better to wait for clarification before proceeding with CfP
    • Required steps
      • Size limits for Kid/Adult need to be set before CfP
      • If we want to change anything in the qualification process, we need to prepare and announce it ASAP
        • No one wants change from the 2019 process
  • The call should include Humanoid Soccer Competition and Humanoid Research Demonstration

Newsletter on a monthly basis

  • It worked well before virtual competition
  • It could be adapted on a less frequent basis to update teams on whats going on

Virtual HSC Competition / Champions League

  • Updates on logistics: Concept and support from the RoboCup Federation
    • Last year, everything was done through Maike’s personal account
      • Risk was taken personally
      • Expenses were paid upfront personally
      • Not sustainable solution on long-term
      • Asking to RCF what would be the other option
        • Access to AWS infrastructure from RCF might be difficult
          • We need several access rights, it might be complicated for RCF to give all of them
        • Collecting the money if that’s a one time event should not be a problem
        • New European RoboCup Non-profit organization as secundary option
        • Concerns were raised on the scientific aspect of a continuous champions league event, risk of too much engineering
          • Needs a concept on how we encourage teams to have a real scientific contribution
            • Jacky proposal: include more randomization
            • Ludovic: workshops at the end where teams describe what they used and how it can be translated to the real world (sim2real)
  • General discussion on the future of the virtual competition
    • One of the main question is ‘championship’ or ‘tournament’
      • Championship:
        • Competition over several months, each team plays a game every week/2 weeks
      • Tournament:
        • Similar to 2021, all games happen in a limited time (~1 week)
    • Azer: Virtual robots should behave better than real robots (less problems)
      • In last competition, some teams were not able to start game due to technical issues
      • It would be good to have several competitions for teams to be able to improve the models and software
      • In favor of championship
    • Reinaldo:
      • Currently setting up the Brazilian tournament, complexity should not be underestimated
    • Maike
      • Championship advantage: less tight for the schedule
        • Easier to have 4vs4 games
        • Less stress with respect to overtime
        • Teams have more time to update their software
      • Cost calculation with ~12 teams and 10 games per team
        • Every team has to pay ~300 USD for the whole tournament
    • Jasper
      • Even uploading it 3 days before would not be a problem if there is two weeks between two games
      • It would be nice to have support for Amazon
        • Jacky will try to establish contact
    • Ludovic
      • Championship means less crunch time → easier for teams and organizers to develop maintainable code and perform fixes or add features between games
    • Azer
      • Possible to host this at his university
        • Maike: Already had this option with Bordeaux, but was voted against for easier reproducibility. Now all the software is prepared for AWS, it would take major effort to make the change.
    • Jacky
      • We shouldn’t force team into the simulator
        • Azer: We should force teams to join because simulation is an important step to build good humanoid robots
        • Ludovic: Teams should not be forced to participate, they should be attracted because of the quality of the games, Jasper agrees
    • Championship as a separate events would work
      • Maike: Clarification that it would not collide schedule wise and it would not be taking participant away from the physical competition
    • Azer
      • We should not mix Simulation league and Virtual Humanoid at all because the are not tackling the same problems at all
        • Reinaldo: Simulation3D wants to move closer to what we are having, but they have problems with performance, so it’s not completely different, they will probably use our simulator as Technical Challenge
        • Maike: that’s also what the RCF has as a goal, we should also keep as a hardware league and not as a replacement.
  • Votes
    • 6 for championship, 1 for tournament
    • Making simulation mandatory for teams? 1 (in favor), 6 (opposed)
  • How to build an OC around the virtual competition?
    • ask teams if people are interested in joining this OC
  • Should we have Drop-In games in virtual competitions
    • Jasper: Maybe later if we want to, maybe start by making it work properly currently
    • Maike: idea proposed was to have one additional game every week as a drop-in game
    • Reinaldo: So many problems for teams for their own software currently that it’s not sure they would be able to prepare for. Teams might not be ready for it
    • Ludovic: From an organizer perspective it would not be too much work, but for teams it will probably require significant work.
    • General opinion agrees on postponing it until current projects works properly.
  • Meeting with 3D-Sim OC:
    • How can we move forward and have a joint initiative with respect to virtual competition
    • Reinaldo will set up a meeting

Future of the Webots Simulator / AutoRef

  • Current situation:
    • Autoref still requires bug fixes or additional features
    • Code is difficult to maintain
    • Currently very few people have their hands in the code
  • How to organize a group of people around this?
    • create two taskforces with members of the league: 1. Infrastructure 2. Autoref
    • call for participation in this group in next newsletter