RoboCup 2015 Virtual Robot Competition: Final Call for Participation

[Francesco Amigoni]

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Final Call for Participation

     RoboCup 2015 Virtual Robot Competition

    July 17-23, 2015 (Hefei, China)
       http://www.robocup2015.org/

We would like to invite all robot rescue teams to participate in the 2015 RoboCup Rescue Simulation League World Championship. 
If you are interested to participate please take the time to pre-register your team for the RoboCup 2015 Virtual Robot Competition.

***** Deadline for pre-registration: February 20, 2015 *****

***** NEW!!! *****
The RoboCup Federation is pleased to introduce a waiver of the team fee for the 2015 international RoboCup competition for NEW teams in the major leagues. A NEW team is defined as a team all of whose team members have never participated in an annual international RoboCup competition. The waiver concerns only the team fee and does not imply any waiver of fees for team members. 
*****

1) RoboCup Rescue Simulation League and Virtual Robot Competition
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The RoboCup Rescue Simulation League is a socially relevant part of RoboCup event. Its main purpose is to provide emergency decision support by integration of disaster information, prediction, planning, and human interface.

A generic urban disaster simulation environment is constructed on network computers. Heterogeneous intelligent agents such as fire fighters, commanders, victims, volunteers, etc. conduct search and rescue activities in this virtual disaster world. Real-world interfaces such as helicopter images synchronize the virtuality and the reality by sensing data. Mission-critical human interfaces such as PDAs support disaster managers, disaster relief brigades, residents, and volunteers to decide their action to minimize the disaster damage.

Addressing this problem involves advanced and interdisciplinary research themes. As AI/robotics research, for example, behavior strategy (e.g., multi-agent planning, realtime/anytime planning, heterogeneity of agents, robust planning, mixed-initiative planning) is a challenging problem. For disaster researchers, RoboCup Rescue works as a standard basis in order to develop practical comprehensive simulators adding necessary disaster modules.

The Virtual Robot competition is based on USARSim, a high fidelity simulator. Within USARSim users can simulate multiple agents whose capabilities closely mirror those of real robots. USARSim currently features wheeled, tracked, and air robots, as well as a wide range of sensors and actuators. Moreover, users can easily develop models of new robotic platforms, sensors, and test environments. 

See for more information http://wiki.robocup.org/wiki/Rescue_Simulation_League

2) Pre-registration
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For the pre-registration please send before ***February 20, 2015*** an email to A.Visser at uva.nl with as attachment the following form filled in:

http://home.deib.polimi.it/amigoni/IntentVirtual2015.txt

3) Qualification material
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Besides the pre-registration please prepare before ***February 28, 2015*** the following qualification material: 
A Team Description Paper describing the most innovative contributions or scientific results.
The TDP is limited to 8 pages and must be formatted according to the LNCS format: 
http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0

The Team Description Paper is an overview of the methodologies you used and intent to use 
to control your robots inside the Virtual Robot Competition. If applicable, include a reference 
to your latest publications.

The qualification material should be placed on a dedicated web page on the team's home page. 
Please include the link to the qualification material on the pre-registration information.

4) Important dates
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- Deadline for pre-registration Virtual Robot Competition: February 20, 2015
- Deadline for qualification material Virtual Robot Competition: February 28, 2015
- Team qualification notification: March 5, 2015

5) Rules
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The rules for the RoboCup 2015 Virtual Robot Competition will be published at:
http://www.robocuprescue.org/wiki/index.php?title=VRCompetitions#Rules
The latest version currently available is 1.0, January, 2015. 
It will be finalized with minor changes, also according to the input from the participating teams.


We hope to see you all in China!

With kind regards,
Sanaz Taleghani, Masaru Shimizu, and Francesco Amigoni
2015 RoboCup Rescue Simulation Virtual Robot Competition Technical committee
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Francesco Amigoni, Ph.D.
Associate Professor

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Laboratory
Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria
Politecnico di Milano
Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, 32
I-20133 Milano (MI), Italy

Voice: +39 02 2399-3475
Fax: +39 02 2399-3411
Email: francesco.amigoni at polimi.it
Web: http://www.deib.polimi.it/people/amigoni
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