ROBOCUP 2020 AGENT SIMULATION – CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

Co-located with the
RoboCup 2020
https://2020.robocup.org

IMPORTANT DATES

Pre-Registration……………………………….: February 22, 2020 (23:55 GMT)
Team Description Paper (TDP) submission.: February 29, 2020 (23:55 GMT)
Qualified teams announcement…………..…: March 10, 2020
Camera-ready TDP submission………….….: May 31, 2020 (23:55 GMT)
Tournament dates………………………..……: June 25-28, 2020

ABOUT ROBOCUP RESCUE AGENT SIMULATION LEAGUE

Natural disasters are major adverse events that cause large-scale economic, human, and environmental losses. They are usually difficult to predict and even more challenging to prevent from happening. These characteristics demand disaster management strategies to be in place to mitigate damaging consequences when a disaster happens.

The mission of the RoboCup Rescue Agent Simulation League is to promote research and development in the socially significant domain of natural disaster with focus on multiagent teamwork coordination and decision support systems. 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 rescue plans can be assessed. Second, it aims to define evaluation benchmarks for response plans elaborated by policy-makers. 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 response plans to effectively respond to natural disasters and reduce the negative impacts on society.

The 2020 RoboCup Rescue Agent Simulation League is composed of three competitions:

·         Agent Simulation

·         Infrastructure

·         Technical Challenge

COMPETITIONS

Agent Simulation Competition

This competition involves primarily evaluating the performance of agent teams developed using the Agent Development Framework (https://github.com/roborescue/rcrs-adf) on different maps of the RoboCup Rescue Agent Simulation (RCRS) platform (https://github.com/roborescue/rcrs-server). 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 scenarios 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 teams. 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).

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

Teams with the highest scores at the final round receive a prize.

Specific rules for participating on the RCRS competition are available at https://rescuesim.robocup.org/robocup-2020/.

Infrastructure Competition

The Infrastructure competition involves the presentation of tools or simulators related to disaster management issues already developed by the participating team. The aim is to evaluate possible enhancements and expansions of the RoboCup Rescue Simulation League environment (both the agent simulator and frameworks and the virtual robot platform) based on the new ideas and concepts proposed in these tools and simulators. The evaluation will be done by a panel of experts and the winner chosen accordingly to a set of factors related to the technical aspects of the tool or simulator and the presentation. The winner tool will be selected for further integration with the simulation platform.

The participation on Infrastructure competition requires the submission of a detailed Team Description Paper (TDP) describing the tool or simulator. In addition to the submission of the TDP, teams interested in participating on the Infrastructure competition must release their source code as an open-source project PRIOR to May 31, 2020. Even after the team is accepted for participating on the competition, if they do not release the source code before the agreed date, they will be disqualified and will not be allowed to participate in the competition. Thus the team will not be evaluated or considered for winning the prize.

Participant teams should address topics including, but not limited to

·         Improve the RoboCup Rescue Simulation to transfer the outcomes of the simulator to the real world disaster situation.  

·         Improvements to the Virtual Robot Simulator

·         Improvements to the Agent Development Framework

·         Increase the number of participants on the RoboCup Rescue league

·         Provide agent development kits that render easy the participation of newcomers

·         Integrate the Agent and Virtual Robot competitions

·         Improve the RoboCup Rescue sub-simulators

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’s 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.

PRE-REGISTRATION

Teams must register via the submission system available at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=rcrs2020 no later than February 22, 2020 (23:55 GMT). This pre-registration requires only to fill the “Title” field and the name, institution, and contact information of all team members. The “Title” field should be “Agent_[TeamName]” to participate in the Agent Competition and “Infrastructure_[TeamName]” for the infrastructure competition, where [TeamName] should be replaced by the name of the team. The pre-registration does not imply that the team will be evaluated to participate in the competition, please see the QUALIFICATION section below for further information.

QUALIFICATION

Teams must submit a Team Description Paper (TDP) (in English) for each competition (Agent Simulation and Infrastructure), and the TDP should elaborate the focus, ideas and recent advancements implemented by the team. The TDP is limited to 16 pages and must be electronically submitted as PDF through the submission system available at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=rcrs2020 no later than February 29, 2020 (23:55 GMT).

The TDP file name has to be “Agent_[TeamName]” for the Agent Competition and “Infrastructure_[TeamName]” for the infrastructure competition, where [TeamName] is the name of the team submitting the TDP. This format should be also used in the “Title” field in the submission system https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=rcrs2020.

All teams should prepare their Agent Competition TDP and presentation slides based on the templates available at https://github.com/roborescue/rcrs-templates. 

By the way, teams can use https://www.overleaf.com/docs?snip_uri=https://github.com/roborescue/rcrs-templates/archive/master.zip to prepare their TDPs online.

The Infrastructure TDP does not have a specific template.

All TDPs will be peer-reviewed by at least two PC members. The evaluation criteria of contributions will be based on originality, quality, clarity, and its relevance to the league’s aims.

The suggestions of the reviewers should be incorporated into an improved version (i.e., Camera-Ready version) of the TDP. The camera-ready version should be uploaded to EasyChair no later than May 31, 2020 (23:55 GMT).

GENERAL QUALIFICATION RULES

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

1.    One-Third-Rule: Only one third of the participating teams may come from the same country. If more than one third of the qualified teams come from the same country, the first one third (floor rounded) will be qualified and the remaining disqualified due to this rule. If a team has members from more than one country, all country counts. False country statement results in penalty.

2.    One-Team-Per-Research-Institution: A university or research institute may only qualify one team. If a team is affiliated with more than one institution, all affiliation counts. False institution statement results in penalty.

3.    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.

4.    No-Show-Penalty: If a team qualifies for the RoboCup 2020, but is not able to come to the venue, the team is required to cancel its participation ONE MONTH before the final registration deadline of the RoboCup 2020 by sending an email to robocuprescuesim@gmail.com. This will give an opportunity to the next qualified-ranked team to participate in the competition. If a team fails to report it is unable to participate in the competition (‘no-show’), the team and its members will be banned of RoboCup 2020 competition.

5.    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 March 10, 2020.