RCAP 2018 Call for Participation

Call for Participation

RoboCup Asia Pacific 2018
Rescue Simulation League Tournament
to be held at Kish Island, Iran- December 5-10, 2018
http://www.robocupap2018.org

 

IMPORTANT DATES
pre-registration: 1 August – 31 August 2018

Team Description Paper (TDP) submission: 10 September 2018

Qualified teams announcement: 15 September 2018

Early registration: 15 September – 15 October 2018

Regular registration: 16 October – 16 November 2018

Late registration: 17 November – 30 November 2018

 

ABOUT ROBOCUP RESCUE SIMULATION LEAGUE
Natural disasters are major adverse events that cause large-scale economic, human, and environmental losses. They are usually difficult to predict and it is even more challenging to prevent them from happening. These characteristics demand disaster management strategies to be in place for the mitigation of damaging consequences when a disaster happen.
The mission of the RoboCup Rescue Agent Simulation League is to promote research and development in the socially significant domain of natural disaster. The effective implementation of this mission is translated into three main objectives. First, the league aims to provide a simulator able to realistically represent natural disaster scenarios where response plans can be assessed. Second, it aims to define evaluation benchmarks for response plans elaborated by policy-makers to act in real natural disaster situations. Finally, it aims to promote research and development by organizing competitions to stimulate the exchange of ideas and experience between researchers and practitioners. These aims are designed to help in the development of more sophisticated and formalized plans to effectively respond to natural disasters and reduce the negative impacts on society.

The 2018 RoboCup Asia Pacific Rescue Simulation League Tournament is composed of the following competitions:

  • Agent Simulation
  • Technical Challenge
  • Virtual Robot

 COMPETITIONS

Agent Simulation Competition
This competition involves primarily evaluating the performance of agent teams developed using Agent Development Framework on different maps of the RoboCup Rescue Agent Simulation (RCRS) platform. Specifically, it involves evaluating the effectiveness of Ambulance, Police Force, and Fire Brigade agents on rescuing civilians and extinguishing fires in cities where an earthquake has just happened.

The Agent Simulation competition is composed of a preliminary round split in 2 phases, a semi-final round, and a final round. Each round is composed of a set of maps representing different possible situations used to evaluate and score each agent team at each round. A single score is assigned to each team per round.

In addition to the evaluation of teams performance on the maps, teams are also evaluated based on a presentation of their implemented strategy. This presentation aims to share the knowledge of the teams and improve the academic research aspects of the league. Each team will have 20 minutes to present their implementation and another 10 minutes for questions and answers. The presentation will be evaluated by a panel of experts and these evaluations will be incorporated into the score of the preliminary round. The presentation ranking will be considered as an additional map in the scoring system of all rounds.

The teams participating in the Agent Simulation competition will automatically participate in the Technical Challenge competition (see description below).

The participation in the Agent Simulation competition requires the submission of a detailed Team Description Paper (TDP) describing the strategies implemented on the agents’ code.

The three teams with the highest scores at the final round receive a prize.

The competition rules can be downloaded here 2018 RCRS Rules.

Technical Challenge Competition
The Technical Challenge competition assesses the modularity of the teams implementation using the ADF. The participation to the Technical Challenge will be compulsory to teams participating in the Agent Simulation Competition because the teams are required to implement their code using the ADF. Therefore, teams are not required to send a separate Team Description Paper (TDP) to participate in this competition.

The Technical Challenge competition will select one specific ADF module (To Be Defined) from the best three teams in the Preliminary round to use in all participating teams. Each team will have their ADF module replaced by the selected module of the best three teams and the team’s code will be run in selected scenarios (all teams will run on the same scenarios). The final team’ score will be the worst score among all runs.

The RoboCup Rescue Agent Simulation chairs will use the Sample Agent to check the modularity of the selected module of the best three teams at the end of the Agent Competition Preliminary round. If the module is not exchangeable, meaning that it depends on specific information from the team’s code, then the team will have the best scenario score of the semi-finals disregarded. The next best team in the Preliminary round will be assessed to share its module to replace the one disqualified.

 

Virtual Robot Competition

The RoboCup Rescue Simulation League is a socially relevant part of RoboCup event. Its main purpose is to provide emergency decision support by integration of disaster information, prediction, planning, and human interface.

A generic urban disaster simulation environment is constructed on network computers. Heterogeneous intelligent agents such as firefighters, commanders, victims, volunteers, etc. conduct search and rescue activities in this virtual disaster world. Agents can sense their environment and make decisions on the basis of the perceived data. Mission-critical human interfaces support disaster managers, disaster relief brigades, residents, and volunteers to decide their actions to minimize the disaster damage.

Addressing this problem involves advanced and interdisciplinary research themes. As AI/robotics research, for example, behavior strategy (e.g., multi-agent planning, real-time/anytime planning, heterogeneity of agents, robust planning, mixed-initiative planning) is a challenging problem. For disaster researchers, RoboCup Rescue works as a standard basis in order to develop practical comprehensive simulators adding necessary disaster modules.

Since 2016, the Virtual Robot Competition is based on ROS/Gazebo, an advanced robot simulator in which users can simulate multiple agents whose capabilities closely mirror those of real robots. ROS/Gazebo currently features several ground and air robots, as well as a wide range of sensors and actuators. Moreover, exploiting ROS, users can easily develop their robot systems integrating standard modules.

Previous Virtual rescue robot competitions materials:

  1. https://github.com/m-shimizu/
  2. https://github.com/reyhanehpahlevan/
  3. https://github.com/amirezakabiri/

List of useful links:

  1. Robotic Operating System(ROS)
  2. Gazebo Simulator
  3. Virtual Robot setup and results RoboCup 2017 
  4. Virtual Robot Competitions 2018 rules
  5. Available team description paper
  6. Robocup 2018 Repository(you can set up the environment and control your robots using keyboard/joystick using this repository)
  7. Available Open source code
  8. Robocup 2017 Repository, Robocup 2016 Repository(old models and launch files could be found here)
  9.  More documentation could be found in rescuesim website

 

QUALIFICATION
The team must submit a Team Description Paper (TDP) (in English) describing the focus, ideas, and recent advancements implemented in the team. The TDP is limited to 8 pages and must be electronically submitted as PDF through the submission system available at EasyChair no later than September 10, 2018 (23:59 UTC).

All teams should prepare their Agent Competition TDP and presentation slides based on the templates.

GENERAL QUALIFICATION RULES
There are several general rules specified by the RoboCup Federation on which the qualification process and the tournament are based:

  1. Plagiarism-Penalty: If a team commits plagiarism, the team and its members will be banned participating on the current and next year’s RoboCup Rescue Simulation competitions. The term plagiarism comprises any use of external knowledge without proper referencing, i.e., copying or using thoughts, ideas, texts or language in general and presenting them as their own. This applies for Team Description Papers as well as team code. All kinds of licenses and copyright have to be respected. This applies to the qualification process and the RoboCup tournaments. Please be aware that when a team is found guilty of committing plagiarism it is disqualified and banned at any time. This may also be in the middle of the tournament.
  2. Academic-Fairness-Rule: If any team breaches general academic fairness in any other way, it may face penalties as well.

 

QUALIFICATION RESULTS
Qualification results will be announced on September 15, 2018.