20211119_tc_meeting - RoboCupAtHome/RuleBook GitHub Wiki

Meeting Info

  • Time and location: 17:00-18:00 CET over Zoom
  • Attendees: Matteo Leonetti, Alex Mitrevski, Katarzyna Pasternak, Fagner Pimentel
  • Note taker: Katarzyna, with additions by Alex

Agenda

  1. General discussion about the rulebook and planning concrete steps for the 2022 rulebook

Notes

  • League format - will we hold it in person and simulation or only in person? Need to follow up with the Executive Committee
  • COVID restrictions - what is the plan if we cannot travel? Back up plan for online RoboCup@Home

Rulebook discussion:

  • How do we want to orient the competition tasks - focus on research or engineering? Relevant issue discussions in this context: https://github.com/RoboCupAtHome/RuleBook/issues/536 and https://github.com/RoboCupAtHome/RuleBook/issues/675
  • Identify areas of interest for the community:
    • Survey papers for open problems of interest to the research community
    • Send out survey to RC@Home and then robotics mailing lists (robotics-worldwide, eu-robotics) to identify areas of interest to research labs and how the competition could serve them to evaluate their progress
  • Tasks for RoboCup@Home 2022 - plan to modify and adapt existing tasks due to the time restrain
  • Assessments vs learning outcomes - what do we want to take away from them competition, how will it help us assess our progress on team's research
  • Making RC@Home more approachable:
    • High level to join for new teams and/or teams with fewer resources
    • Particularly for an in-person competition, it doesn't pay off for teams to travel and invest a lot of resources just so that they are eliminated after one competition day. Consider either (i) eliminating the stages or (ii) having a smaller second-stage competition (with a set of less ambitious tasks) for teams that didn't perform well in the first stage (somewhat along the lines of the recently introduced Nations League in football, where teams compete in different tiers)
    • Having different difficulty levels and scoring for tasks to encourage greater participation in the competition (e.g. Clean up: 10p - pick known item, 30p - pick unknown item, 100p - fold a shirt or piece of fabric shaped item, or similar scoring). Essentially, have ambitious task definitions and reward teams for doing difficult tasks so that they are encouraged to work on unsolved problems
  • Human-robot interaction component:
    • Important for an @Home service robot - teams should be awarded for working on natural human-robot interaction
    • A concern raised by Alex is that some teams may not have HRI experts in their teams; from that point of view, the current split into Housekeeper and Party Host tasks makes sense
    • Can be introduced as an added layer for scores within tasks or a new task as current tasks do not evaluate it

TODOs

The following are tasks for the next two weeks:

  1. Look at papers and surveys to identify the goals for upcoming RoboCup, i.e. so that the tasks have a clear relation to open problems in the community
  2. Create a survey for the community to find out what we should focus on - consider the balance of representation in different fields

Next Meeeting

Friday, November 26th at 17:00 CET (please email the TC for the Zoom meeting link)