RoboCup Rescue

RoboCupRescue 2007 World Championships CFP

Due to popular demand, the deadline for registration has been extended to the 28th of February 2007. You will need to submit your Team Description Paper, Team Participation Forms and logfiles for 2 runs of your agents.

see the detailed pre-registration instructions here.

Invite

The RobocupRescue Simulation Competition is divided two main strands: the Agent competition and the Infrastructure competition.

• Agent Competition:

  • The Agent competition involves scoring competing agent coordination algorithms on different maps of the RobocupRescue simulation platform. The challenge in this case involves developing coordination algorithms that will enable teams of Ambulances, Police forces, and Fire Brigades to save as many civilians as possible and extinguish fires in a city where an earthquake has just happened. The following general issues have to be dealt with:

  • 1. Path planning under uncertainty (given that roads may be blocked).
    2. Communication with constrained bandwidth and uncertainty
    3. Reasoning under uncertainty
    4. Scheduling
    5. Data fusion
  • This year's competition will see the implementation of a improved simulators, noisy/corrupted communication and sensing abilities, and an improved scoring system.
    
• Infrastructure Competition:
  • The Infrastructure competition involves evaluating tools and simulators developed for the simulation platform and for simulating disaster management problems in general. Here, the intent is, (but not limited to), to build up realistic simulators and tools that could be used to enhance the basic RobocupRescue simulator and expand upon it.
    

Goal

While the general goal of the competition is to develop tools for disaster management, it also provides a playground to try out tools and techniques developed by Multi-Agent Systems and Artificial Intelligence research communities and allow them to showcase the applicability of their techniques to significant real-world problems.

 

Procedure to enter the competitions:

We require that groups intent on participating in the competitions should follow the instructions to pre-register so that they can be directly informed about the settings to be used in the competitions. The deadline for pre-registration is the 28th of February 2007. This does not require submitting any code or detailed explanation of your strategy/simulator. Once you have pre-registered you will be notified when to submit your team description papers and code for the competition.

Special Note for new-comers

We understand that not all groups are familiar with the RobocupRescue platform. However, new teams can either choose to code their own algorithms for the Agent competition or use algorithms developed by other teams in previous years. While the basic robocuprescue package comes with dummy agents pre-intalled, there are a number of JAVA-based and C++-based code that are open source and available for downlaod at http://www.robocuprescue.org/robocup/ (see the compressed files in the different folders which denote different days of the 2006 competition). Last years top 3 teams' codes are directly downloadable from http://www.robocuprescue.org/competitions.html.

To download the simulator and basic agent code, browse the Tools section of this website.

There is also a wiki which is under development and where we aim to store all instructions on how to install and run the simulator and agents.

Finally, please register with the RobocupRescue simulation mailing list to receive regular updates about the simulator changes and to ask questions anything to do with the simulator(s). See instructions on how to do this here.

Important note:

We adhere to an open-source policy on all code submitted to the competition. This means that teams need to make sure that they will not violate any software licences by providing their code for free download after the competition.

Important Dates:

December 17, 2006: Deadline for pre-registration.
February 2007 (Exact date to be decided): Teams submit team description papers
March 2007 (Exact date to be decided): Acceptance notification to participating teams.
July 2007: Competition takes place in conjunction with Robocup 2007.

Organising Committee

Cameron Skinner (University of Auckland, New Zealand)
Arash Rahimi (Iran)
Dr. Nobuhiro Ito (Aichi Institute of Technology, Japan)

Technical committee:

Mohammad Mehdi Sabourian (Iran)
Dr. Sarvapali D. Ramchurn (University of Southampton, UK)
Yasovardhan Reddy (Indian Institute of Information Technology, India)