RoboCup Worldwide 2021 Call for Participation

3D
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Call for Participation
RoboCup 2021 Worldwide Soccer Simulation 3D League
June 22 – June 28, 2021 RoboCup Worldwide Championship
https://2021.robocup.org/
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The RoboCup Soccer Simulation 3D Competition provides a great opportunity to experiment with humanoid robots without the need for investing in robot hardware. It facilitates experimenting using different learning and optimization techniques by providing a simulated environment. Since the games are played with teams of 11 players, the league is also a very good environment for experimenting on multi-robot coordination methodologies.

We would like to invite you to participate in the RoboCup 2021 Worldwide Soccer Simulation League 3D competition, which will take place from June 22 – June 28 as a remote event worldwide. If you are interested in
participating, please register your team and follow the procedure as outlined below.

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Important Dates
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May 2, 2021 (23:59 AoE): Team Qualification Materials Submission Deadline:
May 22, 2021 : Qualified Teams Announcement
Jun 22 – 28 2021 : Competition

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Waiver of the team fee for NEW Teams
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The RoboCup Federation is pleased to continue with a waiver of the team fee for the 2021 International RoboCup competition for NEW teams in the major leagues.
A NEW team is defined as a team with a new name and all of whose team members have never participated in an annual international RoboCup competition. The waiver concerns only the team fee and does not imply
any waiver of fees for team members.

In addition, the 3D soccer simulation league will issue a certificate to the best NEW team in the 3D competition. Since the event is held remotely, no travel costs occur. This is a UNIQUE chance to participate in a world championship!

In order to simplify the entry into the league, league members will offer a tutorial in March or April that explains step by step how to install the required software and how to start coding with team software released by existing teams. The precise date will be announced through the 3D soccer simulation official mailing list.

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Pre-Registration
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No Pre-Registration required this year.

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Qualification
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Qualification is based on a team’s current performance, previous achievements in RoboCup, and scientific contributions in relevant areas in past years, cooperation in the 3D mailing list, and development of the simulator. Also, up to six slots will be assigned in priority to new teams. Since RoboCup 2020 had to be postponed to 2021, as a special rule for this year only, all ten teams qualified for 2020 are automatically qualified for 2021 once they register. In RoboCup 2021, up to 24 teams will participate in the 3D Soccer Simulation Competition. The remaining (at least) 14 slots will be selected through a qualification process.

The qualification deadline is the 2nd of May 2021.

Qualification material consists of:

  1. Team Description Paper (TDP)
    The TDP should describe your research focus and ideas implemented in the team.
    It should clearly describe your own work and your contributions in addition to explicitly specifying what you have used from others’ efforts (including, but not limited to, any source code released by other teams or their scientific work). In qualification, teams must be judged based on their own work, so failing to acknowledge the work of
    others could result in immediate disqualification. The length of the TDP must be at least four (4) pages and should not exceed twelve (12) pages in Springer LNCS Style.
    Please submit the TDP only as a PDF document, with the name of your team in the filename, i.e. Teamname_TDP.pdf .

  2. A List of Publications and Achievements on previous RoboCup Symposia and in other relevant international journals and conferences. Please do not include TDPs that you submitted to RoboCup in previous years. Please
    also include your team’s achievements in RoboCup and related events of previous years. If you are new to the RoboCup 3D community, you may also include references to relevant research done by your team that shows its
    potential. Please submit the contribution list as a PDF document, with the name of your team in the filename, i.e. Teamname_list.pdf .

  3. Binary
    All teams should submit a working binary of their team. The OC will use these binaries to play 11 vs 11 matches, under the rules and with the simulator used during the 2019 competitions.

Submitted binaries should adhere to the following:

  • Two scripts should be included: a startup script, called start.sh, to run a full team of agents, and a kill script, called kill.sh, to fully kill all agents of the team. The requirements and examples of these scripts can be found on the rules page.

  • All necessary external libraries should be included and be used locally by the binary. The OC will not make an effort to install extra libraries on the qualification systems. A Java runtime can be assumed to be available.

  • The binaries should not create any output, be it through standard output or to files and no graphical (debugging) interface should be used.

  • The binary should be compiled for 64 bit systems and should work on a modern GNU/Linux distribution, such as Ubuntu 18.04. You may also send 32-bit binaries, but it is your responsibility to make sure that it runs correctly on 64-bit distributions. You can assume that basic 32-bit libraries (e.g. libc) are installed on the 64 bit OS. To summarize: the binary should run out of the box on a standard, clean, headless system in a restricted sandbox environment with the simulation server (possibly) running on a different machine. The OC will not try to fix
    errors. When a binary fails to run, the respective team will be notified and will have to resubmit their material, before the deadline.

Please put all qualification material in a folder with your team name, create a tarball named teamname.tar.gz and upload it to the registration form.

You should upload only one file including all your qualification materials.

Teams qualified for 2020 please upload an empty text file qualified.txt.

If everything works fine, you will receive a confirmation. If you did not receive any confirmation within two (2)
days, please contact the Organizing Committee.

If you encounter any problem sending your qualification materials please don’t hesitate to contact the OC.

Teams will be qualified based on the submitted materials as described in this CfP. The following general qualification limitations will also be considered:

  • One-Third-Rule: The so-called One-Third-Rule rule states that only up to 1/3 of the participants in a competition may be from the same country.

  • One-Team-Per-Institute-Rule: The One-Team-Per-Institute-Rule states that only one team from each university or research institute is allowed to participate in a competition. Note that it is okay for different teams from the same institute to participate in different competitions, e.g. 2D and 3D soccer.

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3D Soccer Simulation League Resources
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Important resources with more information on 3D Simulation League are:

(These source codes include Omni-directional walks, getup behaviors, kick motions, and interface to simspark/gazebo simulator)

Best Regards,
RoboCup 2021 Worldwide 3D Soccer Simulation Organizing Committee