RoboCup2019 Call for Participation

Original Post on robocup-sim mailing list

Introduction

The RoboCup 2D Simulated Soccer League is the oldest of the RoboCup Soccer Simulation Leagues. It is based on the RoboCup Soccer Simulator that enables two teams of 11 simulated autonomous robots plus an autonomous coach agent to play a game of soccer with very realistic rules and game play. Due to its stability the RoboCup Soccer Simulator is a very good research and educational tool for multiagent systems, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

We would like to invite you to participate in the RoboCup 2019 Soccer Simulation League, 2D competition, which will take place July 2 - July 8 2019, in Sydney, Australia. To pre-register all teams have to provide a Team Description Paper, and in case they are based on another team under a license they have to publish the agent source code. The teams will also have to provide a binary file and logfiles showing the team game play quality.

Schedule

Qualification

In RoboCup 2019 up to 16 teams will be allowed to participate in the 2D Simulation competitions. Qualification is based on the quality of the TDP, and the team’s current performance based on provided logfiles. Previous achievements in RoboCup and scientific contributions to the RoboCup community in past years are also relevant for qualification. There are several general rules on which the qualification processes as well as the tournaments are based:

1. One-Team-Per-Research-Institution:

Each university or research institute may only qualify one team. If a team is affiliated with more than one institution, the unbound affiliation counts. Teams infringing this rule will be ignored in the ordered list of qualified teams. False statement results in penalty.

2. Plagiarism-Penalty:

If a team commits plagiarism, the team and its members will be banned from participation for this and next year’s RoboCup. The term plagiarism comprises any use of external knowledge without proper referencing, i.e. copying or using the thoughts, ideas, texts or language in general and presenting them as their own. This applies for Team Description Papers as well as logfiles, team code and binaries. All kinds of licenses and copyright have to be respected. This applies for the qualification process as well as 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.

3. No-Show-Penalty:

If a team qualifies for RoboCup 2019, but is not able to participate, it has to cancel its participation ONE MONTH before the RoboCup-2019?s final registration deadline for the TEAM (by an email to nader.zare88@gmail.com and Morteza.Noohpisheh@gmail.com), in order to give the next-ranked team the chance to take its place. If a team fails to observe this rule (‘no-show’), the team and its members will be banned for RoboCup-2020 competition.

The no-show penalty will apply this year (2019) to the following team and its participants:

4. Academic-Fairness-Rule:

If any team breaches general academic fairness in any other way, it has to face penalties as well.

5. Automatic-Qualification-Rules:

The top four teams from last RoboCup (i.e., Helios, CYRUS, MT and Oxsy) are automatically qualified (after pre-registering their teams and submitting appropriate materials). The remaining teams will be selected through the qualification process.

6. Remote participation

In Robocup-2019 some teams can participate in the tournament remotely, The number of teams that can take part remotely in the tournament is 1/4 of the total number of qualified teams, It should be noted that the registration fee for remote teams may possibly be more than the registration fee of regular teams. Details are not yet determined (under discussion with the federation). The organizing committee does not have any obligation to fix any troubles of the remote teams. The possible occasions of the troubles may include: transferring the source codes from the team to the committee, debugging the team’s source codes, preparing the start scripts, and so on. It should be also noted that the remote teams will have some disadvantages compared to those teams who physically participate at the competition site. The disadvantages may include the binary update during the competition, log file availability, entrust to the executive committee in case of voting during the roadmap discussion, etc.

Pre-Registration

All teams wishing to qualify need to pre-register before the deadline (9 December 2018). To pre-register, send an e-mail to nader.zare88@gmail.com and Morteza.Noohpisheh@gmail.com with the subject ‘2019 Pre-registration TeamName’.

The e-mail should contain the following information:

  1. Team-Name:
  2. Country:
  3. Affiliation:
  4. Team-Leader:
  5. Team Members:
  6. Contact e-mail:
  7. Base-Team:
  8. Dependencies:

You should receive a confirmation e-mail for your pre-registration. Affiliation is the team’s organization, institute or university. Dependencies should include all dependencies of your team binaries from the standard repositories (so every team binary should be executable at the tournament). Under Base-Team each team using another team as base for their agents, has to specify this team. Please note that you have to provide correct and full information and giving false or incomplete statement will be penalized with banning of the team and its members. Please be aware that with respect to gentlemanly play, we will NOT allow any team name changes from the pre-registration to the competition in RoboCup 2019. If a team has based its agent on external code or libraries published under certain licenses or copyright, it has to observe the according rules. In most cases this will be the GNU General Public License, i.e. a proper disclaimer has to be included in Team Description Paper and source code and the source code has to be submitted as well. After official RoboCup competitions the binaries will be published, i.e. the rules of the corresponding license have to be respected as well. For GPL this also implies publishing the code.

Qualification Materials

All teams who wish to qualify need to send their qualification materials by the deadline (09 January 2019). To send the qualification materials, send an e-mail to nader.zare88@gmail.com and Morteza.Noohpisheh@gmail.com with the subject ‘2019 Qualification Materials TeamName’. The e-mail should contain the following information and files:

  1. Team-Name:
  2. Country:
  3. Affiliation:
  4. Team-Leader:
  5. Team Members:
  6. Contact E-Mail:
  7. Base-Team:
  8. Dependencies:

Attachment Files:

  1. Team Description Paper (‘TDP_TeamName.pdf’)
  2. Team Binary (and also source code depending on the base code license)
  3. Links to logfiles (stored as a single file, ‘Logfiles_TeamName.tar.gz’)
  4. RoboCup Soccer Simulation Server Document (‘RcssServerDoc_TeamName.pdf’)

In order to participate in qualification, a team has to send as attachments a Team Description paper, the team current binary, the Soccer Simulation Server Document, as well as links to logfiles showing the team’s game play quality. The deadline for submission is January 9th, 2019.

Team Description Paper

Each team has to submit a team description paper (in English) describing the focus and ideas as well as recent advancements implemented in the team. This paper must have a length of 4 to 6 pages in Springer LNCS style and has to be submitted as PDF (to be named ‘TDP_TeamName.pdf’). Please note: A team can only be qualified if the quality of its TDP is appropriate!

The Team Description Paper (TDP) should comprise, among other things: the scientific focus of the team; team’s current efforts; progress since last TDP/competition; team base code and description how the team is different from the base code; originality of the team’s approach; results (team results or ideally results achieved using the team’s main scientific contribution(s)); related work (at least 5 and ideally more than 10 references comparing the work with related work developed by other teams).

Please be aware that the TDP has to describe the team’s very own scientific efforts and explicitly illustrate whether a team has used external knowledge (ideas, code, agent base or the like) to build upon. If a team did use knowledge not evolved by this team, the own achievements have to be outlined in contrast to this. This also applies if one or more team members have switched from another team or a new team is created on the base of another even though the involved persons have not changed. If external knowledge is used but not referenced, explained and differentiated from in the TDP, the team and its members will be penalized with banning for this and next year’s RoboCup.

Team Binary/Source Code

Teams should send an attachment with a working binary. Depending on the base code license teams should also provide the team’s complete source code. Team binary or source code should be compressed in a single file named (‘Binary_TeamName.tar.gz’ or ‘Source_TeamName.tar.gz’).

RoboCup Soccer Simulation Server Document

For RoboCup-2019, the teams that want to participate in the tournament should include a part of documentation of the soccer server as a section of their TDP. This action is aimed at introducing the league to those who are interested in the participation but do not have a good information source.

In this section, you must describe the server in more than 200 words, e.g., how it works, how to work with it, and the specific tips for the server config file. The contributed sections with a high quality will be published on the following web page: https://github.com/rcsoccersim/rcsoccersim.github.io) It should be noted that the documentation is on the official soccer server, not any soccer client libraries that are provided by teams (e.g., agent2d, wrighteagle, etc.).

Logfiles

In order to assess the team’s performance and evaluate its scientific efforts in the context of game play, teams have to submit one logfile against one of the top teams of last year’s RoboCup ( http://archive.robocup.info/Soccer/Simulation/2D/binaries/RoboCup/2018/ ) and one logfile against the latest agent2d ( http://sourceforge.jp/projects/rctools/downloads/55186/agent2d-3.1.1.tar.gz/ or later). Logfiles comprise both rcg and rcl in version 5 (server::game_log_version = 5) generated with compression (server::game_log_compression = 1 and server::text_log_compression = 1) on using the most recent version of the Soccer Server. These logfiles have to prove that the team is competitive enough to participate and demonstrate the team’s characteristics.

Due to the size of logfiles, it is recommended to store your files online and send only the link(s).

Qualification Results

The TDPs and logfiles of all teams will be peer reviewed by experts in 2D RoboCup Simulation League nominated by the OC. The reviewers will evaluate the qualification materials and rank the teams. The ranks will be averaged into a global ranking and the top teams on that ranking will be qualified for the RoboCup 2D simulation competition. Qualification results will be announced on January 22 2019. Please note that the submitted materials of all qualified teams will be made publicly available during the announcement of qualification results.

Appendix

A.1 Explanations to General Rule 1

“If a team is affiliated with more than one institution, the unbound affiliation counts.” General rule 1 defines that only one team per institute may participate in RoboCup. However, if a team XY is affiliated with institution A as well as institution B and there is already a team affiliated with A, the team XY may participate.

A.2 Explanations to General Rule 6

Remote teams can send only one binary file and they will not be allowed to change their binary at any step of the tournament.