Clarification - Hardware/Software sharing

Good Day!

The February 17, 2017 rules state that 8.2.7 International Competition - All teams qualified to the international competition must share their designs, both hardware and software, with all present and future participants.

This appears to be a great way to reduce the barrier to entry for new teams by sharing the current “state of the art” of development.

Can you clarify the full intention of this rule? Are teams indeed to publish their full source code and full materials list to help future teams - or are they merely required to share ‘overviews’ of their designs that give glimpses into the true configuration?

Thanks,
Chris

Hello Chris,

Thanks for posting your question. RoboCupJunior is an educational initiative where participants are strongly encouraged to ask questions to their fellow competitors to foster a culture of curiosity and exploration in the fields of science and technology.

The spirit of world RoboCup competitions is that any technological and curricular developments should be shared with other participants after the tournament. Currently we are working in a new website where any developments may be published after the event to increase the competition level and make easier for new entries to participate.

There are some teams that have some blogs and share openly their developments and their GITs repository but this is open to them.

Remember: It is not whether you win or lose, but how much you learn that counts!

Best regards,

Ing. Roberto Bonilla
RoboCupJunior International
General co-Chair Organizing Committee
http://www.robocupjunior.org/

I would like to chime in my 2cents input to this topic.

I see what Chris mentioned … the “overview” is a good thing. Publish the whole source code not only may not serve the educational purpose, but encourage “copy and paste”.

The share of knowledge “does need” careful balance in order to warrant the best learning value. Hope TC might discuss the possibility of the following,and as the best way to moderate and execute:

  1. mandate winning teams (members only, of course) to do a presentation of what they do. (instead of enforcing them to publish their code. Reading someone else’ code is not best way to learn).
  2. Allow a face-to-face discussion forum where other teams to ask questions and get feedback right at the event.
  3. emphasize the entire engineering process: the winning teams should share as how they execute their entire engineering process and development cycle.

I see these are difficult because of the language barrier and time constraint. But then, we all know TC and OC jobs are not easy. :slight_smile: