Pushed out, referees and fields

[mareksuppa]

Hi @exemle,

Thanks for participating in the forum! Let me provide a few answers to your questions below.

@exemle

Pushed out: If a robot of my team is pushed out of the playing field by my second robot, but this robot is pushed by a robot of the opponent and the force of the opponent´s robot is necessary to push the robot out of bounds, should the robot be penalized?

I understand where you are coming from – the intent of the rules is to penalize “bad behavior” which in your case is pretty clearly what the opponent’s robot is doing. However, I really do not see how a penalization rule like this could be enforced, as currently it is pretty difficult to detect which is actually pushing. So in principle I could see why a rule like this may exist, but I do not see how could the rules be changed so that this could be easily detected and called out by referees.

@exemle

Fields: Also after a years of Robocup, the fields are not standardized. These circumstance causes many problems. For example the exact color of the goals, the carpet and the lines are different in every competition. Especially the carpet influences the movement of the robots a lot, so the teams can´t be sure if their robot works in the competition as it worked in practice.

Right, let me first say that we (that is both the Technical and Organization Committee) realize this and we try to do our best to make sure the fields do not cause big trouble. As you note, especially with regards to the carpet we try to make sure that the organizers use well-tested brands, which are known to work well with RCJ Soccer robots. I believe that in Montreal as well as Nagoya, this was not a big problem.

On the other hand, there are smaller things, like goal colors or white lines, which would are really difficult to guarantee. Thus, RoboCupJunior Soccer kind of emulates the real world in this regard – for all standardization you can find, there is usually need for tolerances and calibration in any engineering field. I do agree, however, that this is not explicitly stated anywhere, and so we could and probably should mention it in the rules. Thanks for pointing it out!

@exemle

In my opinion bigger fields are necessary. Because the robots became faster, most of the time the ball stucks between them or the ball is in the out of bounds area of the field. Another possibility to change this is to make the robots smaller. But this would be more expensive than building new fields, because all motors, many batteries and much other parts would have to be bought new.

I believe we are thinking along similar lines here – this very suggestion has already been mentioned on the forum already (see Inspection and handling of "lack of process rule" - #4 by Ardi123 for instance). I cannot promise anything concrete, but the Technical Committee plans to discuss this for the future rules.

Thanks again for your questions and if you are interested, please feel free to discuss them further!

– Marek