The referee box is aimed pushing the small size league towards full autonomy with little physical human contact with the robots. The referee box, which has been long talked about in the small size league, is a PC program designed to provide a GUI interface to the assistant referee and serial commands to the two competing teams. The referee box will keep a record of the timeouts, time remaining, score and penalties.

This section describes the referee box operation at a general level. For more specific operations see the following section, or the rules, or the rules FAQ.

The operation of the referee box is as follows:

The assistant referee runs the referee box (a laptop with split serial cables) and the referee just does his/her usual thing. The referee box *only* comes in to play during restarts and stoppages. When a game is running the assistant referee does nothing. The only exception to this is when halftime and full time occur. I'll describe this scenario later.

All restarts occur as follows:

1. The start command is now called 'force start' and stop is called 'stop game'. The force start command can be run any time the game is running.
2. The game is currently stopped (or has not yet started)
3. The referee calls out what the restart is. The options are kickoff, penalty, free-kick or neutral. The first three have the second option of being for the yellow team or the blue.
4. The assistant referee selects the radio button corresponding to the restart type. The referee box sends the corresponding command out the serial port.
5. The referee waits until everyone is ready, then blows the whistle
6. The assistant referee, as close as practical to the whistle blow, presses the start button. This causes the start command to be sent out the serial ports and the robots start moving

Now ideally, we don't need to touch the robots except to remove them from the field. We should be able to control everything via the GUI and keyboard during the stoppage in play. For RoboCup 2002, humans will be allowed to reach onto the field to move the robots into position as per usual

When step 3 occurs, your team may ignore or process the command as you so choose. There will be an arbitrary delay (ie while people move their robots), then the referee will say something like “hands off”, and steps 4 and 5 occur. If you look at the software you will see that it is pretty obvious to run.

The referee box keeps track of the game time and timeouts. Now the timeout/game time situations are as follows:

1. When a game timer is up, the referee box will inform the assistant referee, who in turn informs the referee
2. The referee will then blow his/her whistle or inform the team their timeout is up as appropriate for the situation.

And that is all there is to it!

For any help regarding the operation/function of the referee box please email the Smallsize mailing list