Hi @stiebel,
Please excuse my late response – definitive infromation has been tough to go by in the past few weeks/months.
As Peter Stone, the President of the RoboCup Federation announced yesterday, the 2021 RoboCup will be fully virtual – the website has been updated to reflect that.
I do not have any further information about the European event but I suspect it will be met with similar fate.
These are all very good questions. At this point I only have my personal opinion, which would be as follows:
- It would be great to stick to the original timetable and have 18cm robots in 2022 but I can also see why some would be opposed to such a move, which leads me to the next point
- Very few regiona/super-regional competitions where the concept could be tested make this a rather risky move
- Same with the golf ball, as it currently stands, there is no specific “official” model or distributor. Moving to golf ball without having it figured out would be quite risky.
That all said, I very much agree that encouraging (where appropriate and always with safety in mind) the physical activity of actually building robots is easily the second best thing we can do after having some “virtual” alternative figured out as well.
Our (the TC and OC) focus is currently on the Demo Competition but once that finishes, we’ll focus on figuring out the answers to the questions above. Whenever we arrive at some agreement, we’ll try to update the forum as well.
As always, please feel free to reply with any feedback/updates/clarifications on what I may have missed.
Thanks!
– Marek