This page describes the qualification procedures for the Small Size
League for RoboCup 2009. The qualification procedures are similar to
those in recent years.
The organizing committee (OC) will assess the qualification material
and report the results by March 1st, 2009.
Every team that wants to participate has to attend the following
actions by February 9st, 2009 (11.59 PM, GMT+1) (Extended from February 1st):
The team must have completed the preregistration procedure.
The team must submit a Team Description Paper (TDP).
The team must submit a Team Video.
Please pay attention to the following points:
In past competitions, there have been teams that registered but failed to compete at the competition (turning up does not count). This behavior is unfair to the many other teams that could have competed in their place. Any team that registers for a competition and fails to compete will be barred from qualifying for the following competition year (unless the circumstances are exceptional). This rule was introduced for RoboCup 2004 and will be enforced for RoboCup 2009.
Most communication will be done by e-mail using the
Small Size mailing list. Pay attention to these e-mails and answer the OC's questions. A team that does not reply risks losing its qualified place.
We understand that new teams may struggle meeting all of the qualification criteria below. We encourage new teams to submit qualification video material demonstrating their true current capabilities, while stating in their Team Description Paper (TDP) what is expected to be completed by July 1st, 2009. However, teams not meeting minimum required criteria will be considered for inclusion in competitions only after all teams submitting compliant qualification materials.
Each team that passed the qualification or is in the waiting list must submit a message to the organizing committee to confirm whether the team has enough financial support to attend the competition. This message must be sent before March 20nd, 2009 (11.59 PM, GMT+1). If a team in the qualified list can not attend the conference, a team from the waiting list will be selected in the waiting order.
The Team Description Paper should focus on one or two main
components of your developed system. We recommend you to choose
topics that you feel are especially novel, important, or different from
how other teams approach the problem, and/or other teams would be
interested in reading about.
It is especially important to have clear, and focused explanations. You
can assume that the audience is familiar with general Small Size
League topics and can thus devote most of the TDP to the important
issues. In particular, you should explain the technical details of how
your approach works so that other researchers can repeat your results.
In this way, other researchers can gain from your experience, as you
will gain from theirs, and together we can achieve the goals of the
RoboCup Initiative.
At the last competitions, there had been robots that did not comply
with the Small Size rules. To sensitize all teams for regarding these
rules, the following information should be included in the Team
Description Paper: the height of the robot, the maximum diameter of
its projection to the ground, and the maximum percentage of ball
coverage (as defined in the Small Size rules).
New teams should clearly state their current robot capabilities and
what is expected to be completed by July 1st, 2009.
Submission Information:
Your team video must be at least 1 minute of unedited continuous
footage. The qualification video can be either of the following types,
although preference will be given to item 1 (then 2 and last 3):
A video of your robots participating in a RoboCup standard game (i.e. a game at RoboCup or one of the local regional competitions). The video should show obstacle avoidance, shooting and passing skill. The game should be based on contemporary rules (2004 and afterwards).
A video of your robots (there *must* be at least two moving robots) engaging in two or more of the following activities: a) One or more robots competing against an active robot goalkeeper. b) Two or more robot field players actively going to the ball and playing against one another. c) At least two robots playing cooperatively against 5 static or moving obstacles.
A video showing one or more robots partially demonstrating capabilities listed in item 2.
The team video is used by the OC to determine the readiness of a
team to compete effectively and is part of the criteria in ranking teams
in the qualification process. Teams are advised to submit a video
that best demonstrates the readiness of the team to compete in an
international competition.
Submission Information:
To submit the video footage, you must send an e-mail to the RoboCup Small Size mailing list and cc: it also to the organizing committee. The mail should contain the following information:
Please pay attention to the following points:
Please submit a single video file.
The video must be stored on your own server or any reliable online video hosting service (it is better to provide more than 1 link to the video).
Do NOT send the video as an attachment to the mailing list nor to the organization committee!
One of the best ways to provide a good start point for the new and young teams in small-size leagues is Learning from the Best. From this viewpoint, All small-size league committees agreed with the new procedure for selecting the seeded team1) in the competition schedule as follows
To be ranked as seeded teams, all top 8 teams from last year must submit the materials providing additional information about their system.
The additional materials are Extended Team Description Paper (ETDP) and the presentation at the competition event.
ETDP is an extended version of TDP which has no limit on number of pages (at least 20 pages). The submitted ETDP should be written in the same format as the TDP.
In order to maximize the effectiveness of ETDP, all 8 teams are also needed to provide the presentation of their ETDP at the competition event.
The evaluation of the ETDP is based on the Contribution to the Community criteria. This means the other teams (old, young or new) should learn something from the contribution and able to reproduce or use the information in the ETDP.
As the evaluation is based on the qualitative quantities, all top 8 teams from last year which pass the qualification procedure should submit the ETDP as soon as possible. The reason is to allow the committees to have enough time to evaluate the ETDP and give back the feedback to the teams before the final decision is made.
The topics of the ETDP is available
here The due date of the ETDP is April 1st, 2009 (11.59 PM, GMT+1)
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The e-mail subject should be: 2009 ETDP (YourTeamName).