2021 RoboCup Rescue Virtual Robot Competition – Call for Participation

Call for Participation

2021 RoboCup Rescue Simulation Virtual Robot Competition

Online — June 22-28, 2021

Co-located with the

RoboCup 2021

https://2021.robocup.org

IMPORTANT DATES

Pre-Registration……………………………….: March 31 April 7 April 16, 2021 (23:55 GMT)

Team Description Paper (TDP) submission..: May 2, 2021 (23:55 GMT)

Qualified teams announcement…………..…: May 20, 2021

Team registration deadline…….…………..…: June 7, 2021

Camera-ready TDP submission………….….: June 8, 2021 (23:55 GMT)

Tournament dates………………………..……: June 22-28, 2021

Apologies if you have received multiple copies of this announcement. We would like to invite all robot rescue teams to participate in the 2021 RoboCup Rescue Simulation League World Championship.

If you are interested to participate please take the time to pre-register your team for the RoboCup 2021 Virtual Robot Competition as soon as possible, so that we can inform you about the latest developments. The current plan is to give the teams remote access to a competition platform by using a cloud computing service. To know the scale of the cloud computing server, we need to know the number of participating teams. The ultimate deadline for pre-registration is set on March 31, 2021.

(1) RoboCup Rescue Simulation League and Virtual Robot Competition

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The RoboCup Rescue Simulation League is a socially relevant part of the 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.

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, by exploiting ROS, users can easily develop their robot systems integrating standard modules.

Currently addressed research topics include but are not limited to

Human-robot interfaces

Autonomous navigation

Sensor fusion

Image processing

Speech processing

2D and 3D mapping

Distributed planning

Distributed learning

(2) Major changes to this year (2021)

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  1. Online Competition
    Due to the COVID-19, this league will be a fully remote competition. The committee is preparing the competition platform for having the remote games by using a cloud computing service.
  2. Adding a new challenge
    The “Educational Challenge” will be opened this year. The Educational challenge is for undergraduate and/or just graduated teams. The aim of adding the Educational challenge is helping the high school students to shift to the major league. In the Educational challenge, the committee will prepare the mapping task so that the teams can directly use the SLAM-packages from ROS.

(3) Intention of participation

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If you are interested to participate in the competition, please respond, before March 31, 2021, by filling out the following google form:

https://forms.gle/MtQKxuteLcsJzj8p9

(4) Qualification material

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Besides sending the intention of participation, please prepare before May 2, 2021, 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

And the tex template file of the TDP can be found on the overleaf:

https://www.overleaf.com/read/nrcfnpygskyx

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.

(5) Deadlines

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Pre-Registration……………………………….: March 31 April 7 April 16, 2021 (23:55 GMT)

Team Description Paper (TDP) submission..: May 2, 2021 (23:55 GMT)

Qualified teams announcement…………..…: May 20, 2021

Team registration deadline…….…………..…: June 7, 2021

Camera-ready TDP submission………….….: June 8, 2021 (23:55 GMT)

Tournament dates………………………..……: June 22-28, 2021

(6) Useful links

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Official Virtual robot competition website:

 https://rescuesim.robocup.org/

Previous Virtual rescue robot competitions materials:

1. https://robocup-rsvrl.github.io (The index page for past year codes and TDPs)

2. https://github.com/m-shimizu/

3. https://github.com/reyhanehpahlevan/

4. https://github.com/amirezakabiri/

Here is the list of useful links:

1. Robotic Operating System(ROS)

2. Gazebo Simulator

3. Virtual Robot Competitions 2019 rules

4. Available team description papers

5. Virtual Robot former Robocup setup

6. Available Open source code

7. Robocup 2016-2019 maps and information could be found in  https://github.com/RoboCup-RSVRL

8. More documentation could be found on the rescuesim website