Rule incompliance notification

RoboCupJunior Rescue
1

Dear RCJ Rescue Competitors,

As the RoboCup competition quickly approaches, the local organizers, volunteers and committee members are working hard to finalize all preparations and get ready to receive you in Salvador in less than 2 weeks from now. As part of these preparations, we have been performing document evaluation for all teams, to not only have the scores ready ahead of the competition, but to also ensure that all participants are in compliance with the 2025 ruleset.

While the document evaluation hasn’t been finalized yet, we have noticed something that is of big concern for the RCJ Rescue Committee. Around 50% of the teams are not fully in compliance with the 2025 rules, being the vast majority of the inconsistencies around the new rule 4.1 Terms and Definitions due the misunderstanding of the valid use of AI in the competition. It seems that the vast majority of the teams in this situation are utilizing existing AI models that were re-trained with new images and labeling without making further model changes, which is not considered development. The committee recently created a forum post to explain this in more detail, which we recommend taking a look: Clarification on the Use of AI - RoboCupJunior Rescue - RoboCupJunior Forum.

As you can expect, this is a difficult situation to be in. As the competition organizers, our goal is to enforce the rules in the fairest way possible for all teams, to foster an educational learning experience for years to remember. That being said and considering that we are still finalizing the document evaluation and assessment, the committee is still determining what is going to be the best course of action in this scenario.

We decided to inform you as soon as possible of this incompliance situation as it unfolds for the sake of time. If your team is able to identify being in this situation, it is important to recognize that it’s against the rules and there might be implications during the competition. If there is a way for your team to be compliant in this short amount of time, we highly recommend making the changes necessary.

If there are any recommendations or concerns, please reach out to us as soon as possible. We will try to let you know of a final verdict as soon as we are able to, always looking for the fairest possible outcome for the competitors to showcase their hard work on the field.

RoboCupJunior Rescue Committee

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Are you going to inform each team individually of their current compliance status?

3

Hi @jp.dip

We want to notify the impacted teams as soon as possible, but want to emphasize that we are having every document review in 3 main buckets:

  • Clearly AI compliant.
  • Clearly non-AI compliant.
  • In doubt if the team is compliant or not.

Keep in mind, considering the sensibility about this topic and recognizing the short amount of time before the competition, we are trying to go above and beyond what is initially shared. This means, closely reviewing all team documentation and source code to properly determine in which category each team lands. Also keeping in mind that without a proper team interview (which are always on site during the competition) it is hard to distinguish if a team is really non-compliant or missed to explain some of the development process in the documentation (hence the need to review all team source codes). As you can expect, this is a time intensive task that is being handled with the most urgency at the committee, on top of all the other competition preparations and travel that will be happening in the upcoming days.

I know this isn’t perfect, but due the situation we are today, I don’t think we can strive for a perfect solution but do what we can best do for everyone keeping the competition as fair as possible.

Diego Garza Rodriguez
Committee 2025

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Please refer this annoucement for the latest updates: