• RoCKIn@Home – ERL Service Robots
• RoCKIn@Work – ERL Industrial Robots
• Eurathlon – ERL Emergency

Press release:
European Robotics League to launch at RoboCup 2016 in Leipzig

Milestone

The RoboCup Federation has already agreed to a partnership, under which tasks and functionalities of the two indoor challenges will be shared with RoboCup leagues but will be scored differently and in parallel (with no further effort for the teams) for both competitions (RoboCup and ERL). The final is to achieve convergence of both competitions to the same set of rules and scoring methods.

An initial example of this will consist of including, already for RoboCup2016, two Tasks of RoboCup@Home in the ERL Service Robots rulebook, re-defining the scoring procedure for this task from the RoboCup scoring. A similar model is being prepared for RoboCup@Work.

IMPORTANT DATES AND COMPETITIONS SCHEDULE

2016-2017 Season (ends 28 Feb 2017)

Major Tournaments

RoboCup Magdeburg German Open 24.04.2015
Foto Tom Schulze

Team application, registration and travel support

Teams will have to apply for Major and Local ERL tournaments, in dates to be announced. At application time, the teams will also submit a request for travel support, if needed. For Major tournaments, teams will apply to qualification in the tournament, without needing to apply for ERL qualification. Only teams accepted in the tournament will be able to apply to RockEU2 travel support (not available for RoboCup2016).

ERL applicant teams will have to submit:

• A 4-pages Team Description Paper (TDP) explaining its approach to the technical challenges, including a brief description of software and hardware architectures, and the relation with the team research – including a list of relevant publications.
• A video showing evidence of some performance in the tasks and/or functionalities of the challenge selected by the team.
• A filled form requesting and justifying travel support, if needed.

TDP templates (in LaTeX and MSWord) and travel support form templates (in MSWord) will be made available online.

RockEU2 will designate an ERL Team Selection Committee, composed by representatives of the indoor competition partners. The Selection Committee will select, from the existing applications, the teams:

• qualified for participation in the tournament;
• selected for travel support, from among the qualified teams.

Teams will be selected for participation and travel support based on

• number of available slots for team participation in the tournament;
• available funds for travel support (capped to a maximum of 2K€ per team per year);
• team research quality, as measured from the TDP and list of relevant publications;
• team financial needs (as declared by the team request for travel support);
• accumulated T2RL scoring in past ERL tournaments.

Qualified teams will have to register for the tournament, formally declaring they will participate and accept their assigned travel support (if applicable).

RoboCup Magdeburg German Open 24.04.2015
Foto Tom Schulze

Integration Weeks

Teams selected to participate in a Local Tournament will be involved in an Integration Week (IW) before the actual tournament days. The purpose of the IWs is to ensure a higher team technical readiness level (T²RL) for the teams, where T²RL means the ability of a team to have its robot(s) running without major problems, i.e., flawlessly using

• modular software for quick composition of functionalities into tasks, and
• the competition infrastructure.

Typically, teams will arrive 1-2 weeks before the tournament days, and the hosting institution along with other experts will provide lectures and technical support on using the local infrastructure (e.g., referee boxes, data acquisition and logging, GT set up). Our partners in charge of the camps and benchmarking will support the travel of some of their people to a few of these tournaments during the project lifetime, so as to ensure an adequate organization of the classes and usage of the infrastructure according to the RockEU2 model, as well as to help refereeing.

Referees

As a rule, referees will be recruited from RockEU2 partners, either the local people for Local tournaments or project partners traveling to Local and/or Major tournaments. Whenever this solution will not be feasible, the teams will organize with the local team to referee.

Certification and Rulebooks

• Test beds must be certified to qualify for RockEU2 Local Tournaments, i.e., they mustabide by the rulebook specifications (e.g., fit within dimensions range, include relevant objects and devices);
• have a Motion Capture System for ground truth acquisition for benchmarking purposes.

Latest version of ERL-SR Rulebook

Latest version of ERL-IR Rulebook

Currently, test beds certified for ERL Service Robots are located at:

• IST-ID: Institute for Systems and Robotics at IST, U. Lisboa, Portugal
• BRSU: Bonn Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, Sankt Augustin, Germany
  
  

Currently, test beds certified for ERL Industrial Robots are located at:

• BRSU: Bonn Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, Sankt Augustin, Germany
  
  

Test beds potentially certifiable are currently available at

• Service Robots

o UWE-Bristol: University of the West of England Bristol, U.K. Assisted Living Studio

o Pisa-PeccioliSmart Home at ECHORD++ RIF

• Industrial Robots

o UWE-Bristol ECHORD++ RIF