Congratulations to all on a successful 2023 RoboCup season. We are now starting the development of the 2024 rules and wish to provide you with an overview of planned changes so that we can open up the discussion to the community.
Overall, we feel like the Line rules have accumulated a lot of complexity over the years. Therefore, we plan to simplify the rules this year quite a bit. Our goal is to make the Rescue Line rules easier to understand for new teams, while still having the option to design challenging fields for the more experienced teams. Below, we have outlined the major planned changes that we expect to be discussed in the rule drafts.
The Rescue kit will be removed entirely.
Victims will no longer just roll around. They will be spheres with an off-center center of mass.
The option for the level one evacuation point will be removed.
All scoring elements along the line will be tile-based. That means no matter the amount of hazards on a particular tile, the score will only be awarded once.
The last segment of the line (from the last checkpoint to the goal tile) will also give tile points.
We also plan to introduce Technical Challenges , which would be a part of the total score (say 10%). These challenges would not necessarily comply with the rules completely, and would require teams to code them at the competition venue. At the same time, we will design these challenges so that no hardware change is required to be made AND the challenge will be simple enough to be coded in a relatively short period of time.
We will be gathering feedback in the following stages:
August 2023: Major changes released for community feedback
End of August 2023: 2024 Draft Rules V1 released
TBD: Open Community Call - Virtual meeting to gather feedback from the community
September 2023: 2024 Rules Released
Please note that all wording and discussion is not final until the official rule documents are released.
Dear Rescue Committee,
We appreciate the simplification of the rules, but some of the rule changes have raised concerns.
First of all, we believe that the Rescue kit fits well into the rescue scenario. It would be unrealistic to remove it. Additionally, it isn´t complicated for the teams that can rescue victims to the level two evacuation point to collect them and deliver them to the evacuation point. It is also a valuable opportunity for less experienced teams to gain experience with the evacuation zone and develop their initial algorithms.
We agree that the last segment also gives tile points, because it’s just logical.
Would it be possible to explain the scoring rule change in more detail or provide an example?
First of all sorry for the late answer! About your concerns…
Rescue kit
Current iteration, with the option to have rescue kit lay in a random location in the field, I would argue is not realistic. If you are sending a robot on a rescue mission, you would equip it with a rescue kit beforehand. Therefore, thematically, only level 1 rescue kit fits, therefore we initially discussed making level 1 the only option for the rescue, which would also succeed in our plan to simplify the rules. However, level 1 rescue kit poses little challenge and offers no learning value, since you already have a incentive to build a some sort of carry-on compartment because of the victims, and for deployment you would only need to find the evac point and deploy the rescue kit, which is once again just a repeat of what you would do with the victims anyway. Thus, we concluded rescue kit to be unnecessary and just “another scoring element”.
Tile-based scoring
It is actually quite simple. Essentially, regardless of number of hazards on a tile, the score obtained for passing such tile is always the same. This means you always gain 10 points for successfully traversing a tile, regardless if it has 1, 2, 3 or 100 gaps on it A tile with two gaps is worth the same amount of points as a tile with one gap. Same goes for speedbumps, intersections etc.
@jp.dip, the draft has been finished. It will be uploaded to the https://junior.robocup.org/ website, I hope, later today. We will write a forum post once it is up!
A tile with two gaps is worth the same amount of points as a tile with one gap. Same goes for speedbumps, intersections etc.