Call for Participation
2018 RoboCup Rescue Simulation League Tournament
to be held at Palais des congrès,
Montréal, Canada — June 17-22, 2018
http://rescuesim.robocup.org/2018-montreal/virtual-robot-call-for-participation
Co-located with the
RoboCup 2018
http://www.robocup2018.org
We would like to invite all robot rescue teams to participate in the 2018 RoboCup Rescue Simulation League World Championship. The Virtual Robot Competition has been largely renewed since 2016, both in terms of the simulation environment, with the transition from an Unreal-based environment to a ROS/Gazebo based environment, and in terms of challenges and rules. If you are interested to participate please take the time to pre-register your team for the RoboCup 2018 Virtual Robot Competition as soon as possible, so that we can inform you about the latest developments.
1) RoboCup Rescue Simulation League and 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.
For more information:
– RoboCup Rescue Simulation League
– Tutorials and links to repositories for the simulation environment
– A demo
– Simulated worlds from previous competitions
– Document describing the transition to the new simulator
2) Pre-registration
If you are interested to participate in the competition, please send, before January 15, 2018, an email to reyhanehpahlevan@ce.sharif.edu with as attachment the following form filled in: http://ce.sharif.edu/~reyhanehpahlevan/Robocup/IntentVirtual2018.txt.
3) Qualification material
Besides sending the intention of participation, please prepare before March 15, 2018, a Team Description Paper describing the most innovative contributions or scientific results your team is intended to provide. The TDP is limited to 8 pages and must be formatted according to the LNCS format: http://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines
The Team Description Paper is an overview of the methodologies you use or intend to use to control your robots inside the Virtual Robot Competition. If applicable, include a reference to your latest publications. The qualification material should be placed on a dedicated web page on the team’s home page. Please include the link to the qualification material on the intention of participation information.