RoboCup Euro 2000 Amsterdam The First RoboCup European Championship and Conference 28 May - 2 June, University Sport Centre, Amsterdam,Netherlands See http://www.robocup.org The Robot World Cup, RoboCup, is an international initiative to foster AI and intelligent robotics research by providing a standard problem, a soccer game, where a wide range of technologies can be integrated and examined. This is the first European RoboCup event, and it will be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The competitions will take place at the Sport Centre of the University of Amsterdam. The best teams of this European Chmapionship will be sponsored by the organizing committe for their participation to RoboCup-2000 Melbourne, Australia. The first Robot World Cup, RoboCup-97, was held in Nagoya, Japan, in August 1997, and included the participation of more than 40 teams. The second Robot World Cup, RoboCup-98, was held in Paris, in July 98, and more than 60 teams participated. In 1999 the third Robot Soccer World Cup was held in Stockholm, Sweden. In August the fourth Robot Soccer World Cup Games will be held in Australia. In order for a team of robot agents to play a soccer game, different technologies must be integrated, including design principles of autonomous agents, multi-agent collaboration, strategy acquisition, real-time reasoning, sensor-fusion, and learning. RoboCup is a task for a team of multiple fast-moving robot agents in a dynamic, nondeterministic, and adversarial environment. The different leagues emphasise different aspects of the challenge of creating teams of autonomous agents. As a test bed for progressing the technology of multiple agent systems RoboCup serves to bring together teams of researchers in a cooperative environment. It is a condition of entry that teams must disclose the technology used in the creation of their teams. The competitions themselves are very exciting and provide both educational and entertainment interest for the audience that attends RoboCup events. Games and Conference Competitions Real Robot Small League (F180): Teams of up to five real robots of small size (approximately 15 cm in diameter) compete on a 1.525m by 2.74 m field. Real Robot Medium League (F2000): Teams of up to five real robots of medium size (approximately 50cm in diameter) compete on a 4.575m by 8.22m field. Simulation League: Software agents play soccer using the RoboCup soccer server simulator, available from the RoboCup Web page. The competition will be played on a parallel machine running Linux. Each agent will be allocated on an individual processor. The simulation competition will take place on a parallel computing system under LINUX, the DAS system. The ETL simulator runs on this system in which each player has its own processor. The registered teams will have the possibility to experiment on this system during the last two months before Robocup European Championship 2000. They send in their code, which will run against another team they prefer (of which they deliver the code) or against the winner of Stockholm The log-files will be sent back. We propose that the codes of the teams cannot be changed after a certain date: June 3. When there are more the 32 teams in the simulation, pre-rounds will be played during June3-5 to come up with the top 32 teams. From these 32 (or less) pools will be formed of 4 teams, and the number 1 and 2 will go to quarterfinals. The quarterfinal, semi-finals and finals will be played in a knocking out system. The simulation competition will be showed on large screens, so that the public present in the hall can follow them. We plan to have also an application available which can be downloaded, so that people can see the simulation competition on Internet in real-time. The simulation competition can in principle run without human interaction/intervention, so that full ordering of simulation teams could be obtained if requested, by playing the losers competitions during the nights. Details of the rules for the different competitions are available at the RoboCup official Web site. Visualization Exhibition A number of groups in the world work on 3D visualization systems of the log-file data of the robot simulator, automatic commenting systems and automatic systems for the selection of the most challenging events during the competition. In particularly by the publicity that the Robocup events gets already now from the media, this will be an ideal opportunity to show the state of art of these systems during Robocup European Championship. We will also make available (and other groups can do also) our 3D visualisator, so that you could see in 3D through Internet in real-time the simulation competition. This is possible as the data-rate of the simulator is relatively low, and the expansion is done locally in the PC by the visualization application. The feasibility of this approach will be demonstrated in the CAVE CAVE coupling during the Stockholm event. Workshop A workshop will be held to present and discuss technical details of the robots and software agents which participate in the competition, as well as other research and educational topics related to RoboCup. A post-workshop proceedings will be published from Springer as a sub-line of Lecture Notes on Artificial Intelligence (LNAI). Details about the paper submission will be made available at the RoboCup official Web site. Registration Procedure All teams intending to participate will have to make a pre-registration before the 31st of December. The registration form will be made available on the RoboCup Web home page, and should be sent to Gerrie Rijnsburger (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam) at gerrie@nat.vu.nl Selection of teams to compete at the World Cup is the responsibility of each league. Teams wishing to enter should consult the league pages at http://www.robocup.org and take care to read the qualification requirements carefully. Minimum requirements for qualification include a team description paper together with a video requirement for the real robot leagues and a simulator log for the simulator league. These must be submitted according to the schedule below. Note that the December registration is a necessary requirement to enter The competition. For registration and all questions on Robocup European Championship-2000, please contact: Gerrie Rijnsburger gerrie@nat.vu.nl Faculty of Sciences, De Boelelaan 1081, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands, tel. +31 20 444 7891, fax +31 20 444 7899. Contact details: dr. H.J.W. Spoelder, Faculty of Sciences, De Boelelaan 1081, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Tel +31 20 444 7866, Fax +31 20 444 7899 For up-to-date information, see the RoboCup Web site http://www.robocup.org. General Questions on RoboCup may be send to kitano@csl.sony.co.jp. Important Dates: Obligatory pre-registration: December 31, 1999 Deadline for papers for workshop: February 15, 2000 Final registration Robocup European Championship: April 1, 2000 Access to the parallel LINUX system (DAS) : April 1, 2000 Simulation: teams can test their code on the target machine of the competition: April and May Teams deliver their final code: May 27 (Saturday) Small/Middle size: teams can set up and test their equipment: May 28 - May 29 Pre-round in parallel: May 30 - May 31 RoboCup Euro 2000 Workshop: June 1 Quarter, Semi-finals and finals: June 2 Workshop Submissions The workshop submission is open to anyone interested in science and technology related to RoboCup. It is not limited to participants of RoboCup competition program. RoboCup commentators, 3D visualization, theoretical analysis of real soccer games, application and relevance of RoboCup to significant social program, specific technologies which may be applied to improve RoboCup's team performance, educational issues, etc, are all welcome contributions to the workshop program. Important All papers should be submitted in a camera ready fashion before February 15, 2000 to: dr. W. van der Hoek, wiebe@cs.uu.nl, Computer Science Department, Utrecht University, Padualaan 14, De Uithof, 3584 CH Utrecht, tel. +31 - 30 - 253 3599, fax. +31 - 30 - 251 3791
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