Dear RoboCupJunior Rescue Simulation community,
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.
Firstly, we would like to mention that we don’t want to make any big changes this year, but we want to improve the existing platform and especially set up the competition infrastructure in a fairer way. At the same time, some rule changes should make it easier to build fields and check for correctness. Below, we have outlined the major planned changes that we expect to be discussed in the rule drafts.
- More consistent and simpler definition for clearances in the maze:
- Remove: Obstacles must be at least 8cm away from every wall
- Remove: all traversable paths must be at least 12cm in area 4
- Remove: Pathways for the robot are intended to be of the width of the tile
- New - All scoring elements will be physically reachable. Physically reachable infers that the width of the path is bigger than the robot’s width.
- Remove: Area 4 will not exceed one-quarter of the entire arena. — Removing this rule will help building smaller fields, while having a harder/ bigger room 4.
- Include Webots Settings (OpenGL). Should simplify the preparation for the teams and make it fairer. This may be obsolete depending on the competition infrastructure.
- Add connection tiles between area 2 and 4 and between area 1 and 3. This will add more possibilities for building different field designs. Right now, maps always have to be built in a sort of “circle” setup.
- Up the camera resolution. This is not part of the rules but more so part of the simulation platform. This change was requested by multiple teams in Bordeaux. Changes to the camera resolution will inevitably result in differences in performance based on the hardware. As a result, this change will depend on the infrastructure solution.
- 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, 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.
We look forward to receiving your feedback!
2023 Rescue Committee