VRCompetitions
From RoboCup
Contents |
Singapore 2010
The 2010 competition is being held in Singapore.
Important dates:
- team pre-registration: January 31, 2010.
- symposium submission : February 2, 2009.
- qualification material deadline: February 15, 2010.
- team qualification notification: February 28, 2010.
- early team registration: March 31, 2010.
- regular team registration: April 30, 2010.
- competition: June 19 - June 24 2010.
- RoboCup symposium: June 25 2010.
The 2010 competition will be based on UT3 port of UsarSim. This port is a shared effort. Team qualification for the 2010 competition will this year be based on community points.
The Tech committee
Stephen Balakirsky (NIST),
Behzad Tabibian(Iran University Of Science & Technology),
Arnoud Visser (Universiteit van Amsterdam).
Pre-registration
Only pre-registered teams can be qualified. Pre-qualification is done by filling in the this form, and sending this form before January 31, 2010 to A.Visser@uva.nl. If you have any questions about the required information in the form, do not hesitate to ask.
Currently 8 teams from 6 countries have indicated their intent to participate in the 2010 Virtual Robots competition. To balance the contribution from the different countries, the number of qualified teams will be less than 8. The qualification will be based on the Team Description Papers (TDPs) and Infrastructure Contribution Plans (ICPs). The TDPs and ICPs will be reviewed by the Technical Committee. The Team Description Papers will be published on the RoboCup 2010 Proceedings CD.
- MRL - Azad University of Qazvin, Iran (homepage)
- Edris Esmaeili Aliabadi et al
- SEU RedSun - South-East University, Nanjing, China (homepage)
- Qian Cheng
- Amsterdam Oxford Joint Rescue Forces - University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, University of Oxford, United Kingdom (homepage)
- Julian de Hoog, Okke Formsma
- IUC - International University of Chabahar (IUC), Iran (homepage)
- Hossein Nekomanesh Haghighi et al
- Ashkan Radmand et al
- UPM-SPQR - Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Sapienza University of Rome, Spain, Italy (homepage)(TDP)
- Alberto Valero et al
- KavehGlass - Iran University of Science & Tech, Rajaee University, Iran (homepage)
- Majid Yasari et al
- Hassan Khotanlou et al
All preregistered teams still have to finish their qualification material (TDP and infrastructure contribution).
Rules
A first preliminary draft (version 1, January 8, 2010) of the rules for Singapore 2010 is available here. The rules are based on the rules of the previous competition, however, several changes have been made due to the new simulation environment (UT3 port of UsarSim). The main change is the strong reduction of the number of allowed robot and sensor types (appendix B) and the explicit procedure to extend this list of allowed robots and sensors (as a community effort).
German Open 2010
The German National Committee, University of Magdeburg and the Fraunhofer institute AIS made it possible to have a Virtual Robot competition in Magdeburg, Germany. Unfortunately, there were not enough European teams to have competition. This year no Virtual Robot competition at the German Open.
Iran Open 2010
The Iranian National Committee and the Azad University of Qazvin will organize in early April 2010 a Virtual Robot competition in Tehran, Iran.
Important dates:
- symposium submission : January 20, 2010.
- team pre-registration: January 21, 2010.
- team qualification deadline: January 21, 2010.
- team registration: March 6, 2010.
- symposium: April 4-9, 2010.
- competition: April 5-9, 2010.
Graz 2009
The 2009 competition is being held in Graz, Austria.
Important dates:
- symposium submission : February 2, 2009.
- team pre-registration: February 28 2009.
- team description paper deadline: February 28 2009.
- early team registration: April 17 2009.
- regular team registration: May 15 2009.
- competition: June 29 - July 5 2009.
- RoboCup symposium: June 30 - July 3 2009.
- SRMED symposium: July 6 2009.
The Tech committee
Stephen Balakirsky (NIST),
Stefano Carpin (UC Merced),
Arnoud Visser (Universiteit van Amsterdam).
Local organizer:
Alexander Kleiner (University of Freiburg).
Schedule
The page about the competition, including a detailed schedule, can be found here.
June 29 - Team setup
June 30 - Test run
July 1 - Mapping Test
July 2 – Deployment Test
July 3 – TeleOperation Test
July 4 - Semi-Finals
July 5 - Finals
Results
Preliminary results
| Rank | Team | Points |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | SEU-RedSun | 114.14 |
| 2 | UC Merced | 83.69 |
| 3 | UPM-SPQR | 74.21 |
| 4 | MRL | 53.37 |
| 5 | Amsterdam Oxford | 48.72 |
| 6 | CFZ | 24.86 |
| 7 | STB | 15.68 |
| 8 | SBCe | 14.89 |
| 9 | NP Solvers | 14.25 |
| 10 | Jacobs | 10.4 |
| 11 | Brazil | 0 |
Finals results
| Rank | Team | Points |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | UC Merced | 293.0 |
| 2 | SEU-RedSun | 169.2 |
| 3 | Amsterdam-Oxford | 88.4 |
| 4 | MRL | 75.1 |
Participating Teams
Currently 10 of the 12 registered teams from 9 countries have participated the 2009 Virtual Robots competition. The 16 Team Description Papers (TDPs) of the qualified teams are peer-reviewed inside the community. Papers which were judged as good and very good are indicated with respectively a star '*' or a double star '**'. The Team Description Papers will be published on the RoboCup 2009 Proceedings CD. The qualified teams could register until May 18. No teams can be registered anymore, only additional teammembers can still be registered on site.
- Max Pfingsthorn, Ravi Rathnam
- UC Merced - University of California, Merced, USA (homepage)(TDP)** (source code)
- Benjamin Balaguer, Derek Burch, Roger Sloan, and Stefano Carpin
- Amsterdam Oxford Joint Rescue Forces - University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, University of Oxford, United Kingdom (homepage)(source code)(TDP)**
- Julian de Hoog, Radoslaw Sobolewski, Helen Flynn, Magda Jankowska and Arnoud Visser
- UPM-SPQR - Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Sapienza University of Rome, Spain, Italy (homepage)(TDP)*
- Paloma de la Puente, Diego Rodriguez-Losada, Alberto Valero, Roberto Vicario
- Majid Yasari, Majid Sadeghi Alavijeh, Sepehr Farhand, Seyed Ali Zahiri
- Iman Sarrafi, Amir Saman Memaripour and Reza Bakhshi
- SEU RedSun - South-East University, Nanjing, China (TDP)
- Shen Hui, Qian Cheng
- Patrick Sturm, Emanuel Plochberger and Leonhard Pfeiffer-Vogl
- Edris Esmaeili Aliabadi, Vahid Azizi, Mohammad Sadegh Kordafshari
- CFZ - Chabahar Free trade-industrial Zone Organization (CFZO), International University of Chabahar (IUC), Iran (homepage)(TDP)
- Seyed Behzad Tabibian, Yousef Kanani, Hossein Nekoomanesh, Milad Amel Zabihi, Soroush Mortezapour, Shiva Shahrokhi, Seyed Alizeza Khatamian Oskooei, Maryam Rahmani
All preregistered teams have submitted their qualification material.
Rules
The technical committee has published the release candidate 2 of the rules for Graz 2009. The rules are based on the rules 2008 competition, however, to further push the league towards novel interesting solutions, several small changes have been made. The main change is the introduction of Elementary Tests in the preliminary rounds, to test the progress on several specific subject. Further, this year a new image server and a new obstacle attenuation plugin were developed. At the German Open , those innovations were tested.
This year, two new robots are allowed in the competition:
The point of contact for the rules is Stefano Carpin (UC Merced),
please refer to him for any questions/clarifications on the rules.
Complementary to the rules is the list of logical configurations, compiled into a USARBot.ini file. Teams desiring to add new components (robots, sensors, actuators) to the set of available devices must contact Stefano and provide the new components by March 31, 2009 to the community. The latest official versions of the USARBot.ini file are labeled version 0.9 of Friday July 4. There exist a version with Indoor Noise and a version with Outdoor Noise. In those versions all non-competition robots and sensor removed.
Evaluation
An evaluation of the competition is published in the following paper:
Stephen Balakirsky, Stefano Carpin and Arnoud Visser, "Evaluation of The RoboCup 2009 Virtual Robot Rescue Competition", Proceedings of the 9th Performace Metrics for Intelligent Systems (PERMIS'09) workshop, Gaithersburg, MD, USA, September 2009. PDF.
German Open 2009
- The German National Committee organized a Virtual Robot competition from April 20 to 24 at the German Open at the Hannover Messe.
- Three teams participated in the competition.
- * Jacobs Robotics
- * Amsterdam Oxford Joint Rescue Forces
- * NP.Solvers
- For this competition two maps were generated, an indoor map (Reactor-D) and an outdoor map (Waterfront-C). Note that these maps have a dependence on the Factory map.
TeleOperation Test
- During the first day the TeleOperation test was tried. Because the Practice World was not available yet, the TeleOperation test was performed in the outdoor world. The target points were not yet available in MIF format (now they are), so they were read as startpositions from the map.
- From the 7 startpositions, only 2 were reached Target5 (62.38,24.37) and Target6 (54.50,33.04). One of the teams tried to reach Target1, but was with two robots just out of the threshold. The other points were too far away or on a too challenging position.
- Results:
- * Amsterdam Oxford Joint Rescue Forces deployed four robots: reached Target5 (62.62,27.27)(2.9 m distance) and Target6 (55.21,34.24) (1.4 m distance)
- * NP.Solvers deployed one robot: reached Target5 (60.97, 24.14) (1.4 m distance)
- * Jacobs Robotics deployed three robots: reached Target6 (56.19,34.12)(2.6 m distance)
Mapping Test
- During the second day the Mapping test was tried. The test was applied on the well known Elementary Test World, the challenge was located in the additional uncertainty in the INS sensor (UsarBot.ini). A logfile of one of the runs is available. Without advanced mapping techniques, the map would look like:
- Instead, maps like this were produced:
- Results:
- * Amsterdam Oxford Joint Rescue Forces 50 points
- * Jacobs Robotics 49 points (small scaling problem)
- * NP.Solvers 8 points (distorted map of the garage)
Deployment Test
- During the third day the Deployment test was tried. The test was applied on the CommExample map provided as part of the Practice World. In this CommExample map also an rough occupancy grid is provided as a priori data. This test was run with WSS 0.6.0 with the DistanceOnlyModel active.
- The robots started in the room at the lower left. Direct communication with the BaseStation not longer possible when the robots exited the room.
- Results:
- * Amsterdam Oxford Joint Rescue Forces 50 points
- * Jacobs Robotics 34 points points
- * NP.Solvers 0 points (no participation due to lack of fully autonomous behavior)
Comprehensive mission
- At the final day the Comprehensive mission was tried, including a fully autonomous break. On this day both an indoor and outdoor scenario were tried. The break had severe consequences. During this break robots glided out of reach on ramps, and teams failed to get control back after the break.
- Indoor Results:
- * NP.Solvers 60 points (131 m^2 explored, no victims found, reasonable metric quality of map)
- * Amsterdam Oxford Joint Rescue Forces 57 points ((96 m^2 explored, no victims found, good metric quality of map)
- * Jacobs Robotics 0 points (software crash)
- Outdoor Results:
- * Jacobs Robotics 130 points (508.75 m^2 explored, 2 victims found, nice map with many additional features)
- * Amsterdam Oxford Joint Rescue Forces 27 points (recovered from software crash, 48 m^2 explored, one victim found (false manual location))
- * NP.Solvers 0 points (software crash)
- Local organizer
- Max Pfingsthorn (Jacobs University Bremen)
Iran Open 2009
- The Iranian National Committee organized a Virtual Robot competition from April 4 to 6 at the Iran Open at the Azad University of Qazvin. For this competition the Factory map was used.
- 6 Teams participated at the Iran Open 2009. The new Image server [Upis] was tested in the first day of competitions in preliminary runs. Not all teams could connect via the new [Wireless Simulation Server], which was allowed until the final. The final was between [MRL] and [IUC].
- Local organizers
- Eslam Nazemi, Shahid Beheshti University, Iran
Suzhou 2008
The 2008 RoboCup competition has been held in Suzhou, China. 10 teams participated in the competition (teams picture).
Important dates:
- team pre-registration: February 29 2008.
- team description deadline: March 9 2008 (extended).
- team registration: April 20 2008.
- competition: 14-20 July 2008.
- symposium: 15-18 July 2008.
The Tech committee
Stephen Balakirsky (NIST),
Stefano Carpin (UC Merced),
Arnoud Visser (UvA).
Schedule
The details about the competition, including a detailed schedule, can be found here.
July 14 - Team setup
July 15 - Test run
July 16 - Test run
July 17 – First Round
July 18 – Round Robin
July 19 – Round Robin
July 20 – Final and runner up final
Results
Prelim totals. Top 4 teams advance to finals.
| Position | Team name | Day 1 (Indoor) | Day 2 (Outdoor) | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | UC Mercenary | 165.16 | 182.82 | 347.98 |
| 2 | Jacobs | 139.45 | 193.13 | 332.58 |
| 3 | STEEL | 173.00 | 158.97 | 331.97 |
| 4 | SEU-RedSun | 133.67 | 156.00 | 289.67 |
| 5 | SPQR | 119.25 | 26.06 | 145.31 |
| 6 | MRL | 69.18 | 46.84 | 116.02 |
| 7 | AOJRF | 62.57 | 39.80 | 102.37 |
| 8 | CSU_YunLu | 8.24 | 64.61 | 72.85 |
| 9 | IUST | 25.41 | 25.58 | 50.99 |
| 10 | Brazil | 24.75 | 7.00 | 31.75 |
Finals
| Position | Team name | Mission 1 (Indoor) | Mission 2 (Outdoor) | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | SEU-RedSun | 91.10 | 192.40 | 283.50 |
| 2 | UC Mercenary | 124.00 | 128.14 | 252.14 |
| 3 | STEEL | 66.80 | 166.60 | 233.40 |
| 4 | Jacobs | 108.65 | 0.00 | 108.65 |
This year, one best-in-class award was presented. It was awarded to Jacobs University for best-in-class mapping.
Participating Teams
10 teams from 8 countries were participating at the competition in Suzhou.
- SEU RedSun - South-East University, Nanjing, China (TDP)
- UC Mercenary - University of California, Merced, USA (TDP) (Source code)
- Steel Team - University of Pittsburgh, USA (TDP)(Source code)
- Jacobs Virtual Rescue - Jacobs University Bremen, Germany (TDP)(Source code)
- SPQR Virtual - University of Rome "La Sapienza", Italy (TDP)
- MRL - Azad University of Qazvin, Iran (TDP)
- Amsterdam Oxford Joint Rescue Forces - University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, University of Oxford, United Kingdom (TDP)(Source code)
- CSU YunLU - Central South University, China (TDP)
- IUST-Tam - University Of Science And Technology, Tehran, Iran (TDP)
- BRASIL-VR - Instituto Tecnologico de Aeronautica, Brazil (TDP)
16 teams from 8 countries qualified themselves for the 2008 Virtual Robots competition. These teams can register as soon as all Leagues have finished their qualification procedure. The registration is extended to May 1th.
Originally 21 teams from 8 countries preregistered for the 2008 Virtual Robots competition.
Rules
The technical committee has now released the second version of the rules for Suzhou 2008. These may be found at (2008 Rules). The rules are based on the 2007 competition, however, to further push the league towards novel interesting solutions, several small changes have been made. For instance, a new wireless simulation server is tested, a new robot is introduced and two new sensors are allowed in the competition:
The point of contact for the rules is Arnoud Visser (arnoud@science.uva.nl)
please refer to him for any questions/clarifications on the rules.
Complementary to the rules is the list of logical configurations, compiled into a USARBot.ini file. This is version 0.3 of Tuesday July 15th, with all non-competition robots and sensor removed.
Evaluation
An evaluation of the competition is published in the following journal article:
Benjamin Balaguer, Stephen Balakirsky, Stefano Carpin and Arnoud Visser, "Evaluating maps produced by urban search and rescue robots: lessons learned from RoboCup", Autonomous Robots Vol. 27 (4), pp. 449-464, November 2009. PDF.
American Open 2008
The American National Committee did a call for participation for the Virtual Robot competition at the American Open at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. There were not enough participating teams to organize a competition at this event.
German Open 2008
The German National Committee has organized a Virtual Robot competition from April 21 to 25 at the German Open at the Hannover Messe.
For the competition, two new maps called Reactor and Waterfront are created. Prior versions of the maps are available as germanopenmapsv2.zip. The apriori of those maps can be found at the UvA-site.
The official result of the competition can be found here:
1. Jacobs Robotics, Jacobs University Bremen, Germany
2. UvA Rescue Team, Universiteit van Amsterdam, The Netherlands
3. NP-Solvers, Fachhochschule Technikum Wien, Österreich
Local chair:
Andreas Birk (Jacobs University Bremen)
Local organizer:
Max Pfingsthorn (Jacobs University Bremen)
Iran Open 2008
The Iranian National Committee organized a Virtual Robot competition from April 2 to 5 at the Iran Open at the Azad University of Qazvin.
For the competition, the new Factory map was used. The Factory map is available at sourceforge
The official results are available here:
1. MRL, Mechatronics Research Laboratory, Azad University of Qazvin
2. Soshiant, Buali Sina University
3. IUST, Iran University Of Science And Technology, Tehran
4. Scorpius, Shahid Rajayee University
Local organizers:
Behzad Helli, Bardia Aghabeigi, Omid Aghazadeh and Maziar Sharbafi
Atlanta 2007
Congratulations to everyone (see group photo) for another great year at RoboCup!
The technical committee would like to thank the following people who made the competition the success that it was...
First the developers who have worked on USARSim this year
Ben Balaguer, NIST
Yashodan Nevatia, Jacobs U
Christopher Pepper, NIST
Chris Scrapper, NIST
Jijun Wang, UPitt
Marco Zaratti, U of Rome “la Sapienza”
Next the Tech and Exec committee
Stephen Balakirsky, NIST
Stefano Carpin, UC Merced
Alessandro Farinelli, Southampton
Alexander Kleiner, U Freiburg
The people who have run this competition
Ben Balaguer, NIST
Stephen Balakirsky, NIST
Stefano Carpin, UC Merced
Chris Scrapper, NIST
Finally the world developers (all from NIST)
Ben Balaguer
Stephen Balakirsky
Christopher Pepper
Chris Scrapper
Participating teams
Eight teams participated to the 2007 event.
- Jacobs Virtual Rescue - Jacobs University Bremen, Germany (Source code)
- BRASIL-VR - Instituto tecnologico de Aeronautica, Brazil
- GROK Lab - The University of Iowa, USA
- UI-ECE Lab - The University of Iowa, USA
- Steel Team - University of Pittsburgh, USA (Source code)
- UvA Rescue 2007 - University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands (Source code)
- SPQR Virtual - University of Rome "La Sapienza", Italy (Source code)
- UC Mercenary - University of California, Merced, USA (Source code)
Final ranking
| Position | Team name | Documentation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | STEEL | |
| 2 | Jacobs | |
| 3 | SPQR | |
| 4 | UvA | UvArescueDesignDecisions.pdf |
For detailed results and competition materials, click here
Qualified Teams
These teams are qualified for the 2007 Virtual Robots competition.
Here you can find general information about Robocup at Atlanta.
Rules
The technical committee has now released the final version of the rules for Atlanta 2007. These may be found at (2007 Rules). The rules are based on the 2006 competition, however, to further push the league towards novel interesting solutions, several important changes have been made. The point of contact for the rules is Alessandro Farinelli (farinelli@dis.uniroma1.it) please refer to him for any questions/clarifications on the rules.
In addition to the rules document, the supplemental information provided below is available to participating teams. Please note that this supplemental information contains data on scoring, formats, and the way in which the competition will be run.
Map Format and A priori Information
A priori information will be provided to the teams. The apriori maps are still available at the UvA site (day2, day3, day4, day5, semi, final). This information may contain a street layout with an indication of where an accident has occurred, or the general outline and layout of a building. It should be noted that this data may contain errors. Streets may be blocked, buildings may have locked doors or rubble that blocks passages. In addition, renovations may have occurred since the a priori data was gathered. The format for this data will be in the form of a GeoTiff file. GeoTiff is an industry-wide standard for specifying cartographic information in a bit-mapped format. More information on the format of the image file and .tfw georeference file may be found in the file GeoTiff.pdf. The exact meaning of the colors is now included in the rules document. AGAIN PLEASE NOTE that this map information may contain errors and should be used with caution!
In addition to GetTiff being adopted as our a priori data standard, it has also been adopted as our required pixmap map delivery standard. Vector maps map be provided to the judges in the industry standard MIF format. This will allow the judges to overlay team generated maps on top of ground truth to evaluate them. Many tools are available for the generation of TIFF images. An example of such an application is the open source CImg package. This package allows one to easily read and write TIFF images. The georeference file may also be easily generated and has the format specified in GeoTiff.pdf. MIF vector maps consist of two relatively simple ASCII files. An example map may be found in the file MifSample.zip.
An example of the anticipated use of the GeoTIFF maps is included in the DM-ElementaryTestWorlds package from the maps release area on sourceforge. The MIF map file provided above may be overlaid onto this map using freeware tools. An illustrated example that uses a freeware tool for both GeoTIFF and MIF may also be found in the file MapScoringHowTo.pdf.
Please be sure to test your map output to make sure that it properly overlays on the ground truth. An example of this is provided in the above mentioned sample.
Competition Challenge Areas
This information is now contained in the rules document.
Evaluation
An evaluation of the competition is published in the following journal article:
Stephen Balakirsky, Stefano Carpin, Alexander Kleiner, Michael Lewis, Arnoud Visser, Jijun Wang and Vittorio Amos Ziparo, "Towards heterogeneous robot teams for disaster mitigation: Results and Performance Metrics from RoboCup Rescue", Journal of Field Robotics, volume 24(11-12):pp. 943-967, November 2007. PDF.
Bremen 2006
After a demo was run in Osaka during Robocup 2005, the first Virtual Robots competition took place in Bremen during Robocup 2006.
Click here to download the 2006 rules. Please notice that changes are likely to occur for the 2007 competition.
Eight teams participated to the 2006 event (teams picture).
- VirtualIUB - International University Bremen, Germany (Source code)
- ITAndroidsRV - Instituto tecnologico de Aeronautica, Brazil
- GROK Lab - The University of Iowa, USA
- SBCe_Saviour - Shahid Beheshti University, Iran (Source code)
- RescueRobots Freiburg - University of Freiburg, Germany (Source code)
- Steel Team - University of Pittsburgh, USA ( Source code )
- UvA ResQ - University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands (Source code)
- SPQR - University of Rome "La Sapienza", Italy (Source code)
The competition was won by the Freiburg team.
- RescueRobots Freiburg - University of Freiburg, Germany.
- VirtualIUB - International University Bremen, Germany.
- UvA ResQ - Universiteit van Amsterdam, The Netherlands (Algorithm)
The organizers also recognized the Steel Team (University of Pittsburgh) for its inspiring user interface and Uva ResQ for their mapping software.
Competition worlds and demos recorded during the competition are available for download from USARSim on sourceforge.
