Robot League
From RoboCup Federation Wiki
Contents |
League Overview
Objective
The RoboCupRescue Robot League is an international league of teams with one objective: Develop and demonstrate advanced robotic capabilities for emergency responders using annual competitions to evaluate, and teaching camps to disseminate, best-in-class robotic solutions.
Approach
The league hosts annual competitions to 1) increase awareness of the challenges involved in deploying robots for emergency response applications such as urban search and rescue and bomb disposal, 2) provide objective performance evaluations of mobile robots operating in complex yet repeatable environments, and 3) promote collaboration between researchers. Robot teams demonstrate their capabilities in mobility, sensory perception, localization and mapping, mobile manipulation, practical operator interfaces, and assistive autonomous behaviors to improve remote operator performance and/or robot survivability while searching for simulated victims in a maze of terrains and challenges. Winning teams must reliably perform 7-10 missions of 20-30 minutes each from various start points to find the most victims. As robots continue to demonstrate successes against the obstacles posed in the arenas, the level of difficulty will continually be increased so the arenas provide a stepping-stone from the laboratory to the real world. Meanwhile, the annual competitions provide direct comparison of robotic approaches, objective performance evaluations, and a public proving ground for capable robotic systems that will ultimately be used to save lives.
Competition Vision
When disaster happens, minimize risk to search and rescue personnel while increasing victim survival rates by fielding teams of collaborative mobile robots which enable human rescuers to quickly locate and extract victims. Specific robotic capabilities encouraged in the competition include the following:
- Negotiate compromised and collapsed structures
- Locate victims and ascertain their conditions
- Produce practical sensor maps of the environment
- Establish communications with victims
- Deliver fluids, nourishment, medicines
- Emplace sensors to identify/monitor hazards
- Mark or identify best paths to victims
- Provide structural shoring for responders
These tasks are encouraged through challenges posed in the arena, specific mission tasks, and/or the performance metric. Demonstrations of other enabling robotic capabilities are always welcome.
Search Scenario
A building has partially collapsed due to earthquake. The Incident Commander in charge of rescue operations at the disaster site, fearing secondary collapses from aftershocks, has asked for teams of robots to immediately search the interior of the building for victims. The mission for the robots and their operators is to find victims, determine their situation, state, and location, and then report back their findings in a map of the building with associated victim data. The section near the building entrance appears relatively intact while the interior of the structure exhibits increasing degrees of collapse. Robots must negotiate and map the lightly damaged areas prior to encountering more challenging obstacles and rubble. The robots are considered expendable in case of difficulty.
Field Description
The RoboCupRescue arenas constructed to host these competitions consist of emerging standard test methods for emergency response robots developed by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology through the ASTM International Committee on Homeland Security Applications; Operational Equipment; Robots (E54.08.01). They are repeatable test method apparatuses that anybody can build and practice. The competition field is divided into color-coded arenas that form a continuum of challenges with increasing levels of difficulty for robots and operators and highlight certain robotic capabilities:
- Simulated Victims: Simulated victims with several signs of life such as form, motion, head, sound and CO2 are distributed throughout the arenas requiring directional viewing through access holes at different elevations.
- Yellow Arena: For robots capable of fully autonomous navigation and victim identification, this arena consists of random mazes of hallways and rooms with continuous 15° pitch and roll ramp flooring.
- Orange Arena: For robots capable of autonomous or remote teleoperative navigation and victim identification, this arena consists of moderate terrains with crossing 15° pitch and roll ramps and structured obstacles such as stairs, inclined planes, and others.
- Red Arena: For robots capable of autonomous or remote teleoperative navigation and victim identification, this arena consists of complex stepfield terrains requiring advanced robot mobility.
- Blue Arena: For robots capable of mobile manipulation on complex terrains to place simple block or bottle payloads carried in from the start or picked up within the arenas.
- Black/Yellow Arena (RADIO DROP-OUT ZONE): For robots capable of autonomous navigation with reasonable mobility to operate on complex terrains.
- Black Arena (Vehicle Collapse Scenario): For robots capable of searching a simulated vehicle collapse scenario accessible on each side from the RED ARENA and the ORANGE ARENA.
- Aerial Arena (< 2 KG, VTOL sUAS): For small unmanned aerial systems under 2 kg with vertical take-off and landing capabilities that can perform station-keeping, obstacle avoidance, and line following tasks with varying degrees of autonomy.
A detailed description of fields can be download from here. Detailed Field Description
Organization
- Trustees
- Adam Jacoff, National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA (Trustee 2009-2012)
- Satoshi Tadokoro, Tohoku University, Japan (Trustee Emeritus)
- Executive Committee
- Johannes Pellenz, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany (Exec 2010-2013)
- Tetsuya Kimura, Nagaoka Univ. of Technology, Japan (Exec 2009-2012)
- Ehsan Mihankhah, K.N. Toosi University of Technology, Iran (Exec 2008-2011)
- Jackrit Suthakorn, Mahidol University, Thailand (Exec 2011-2014)
- Andreas Birk, International University Bremen, Germany (Exec Emeritus)
- Technical Committee
- Michael Hofbaur, Technische Universität Graz, Austria (TC 2009-2012)
- Jafar Chegini,Iran (TC 2011-2014)
- Sören Schwertfeger, Germany (TC 2011-2014)
- Organizing Committee
- Adam JacoffNational Institute of Standards and Technology, USA (Chair)
- Guillermo Hernandez, Mexico (Local Chair 2012)
- Ann Marie Virts, National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA (OC 2011-2013)
- Raymond Sheh, University of New South Wales (OC 2011-2013)
Rules
Rules Overview
Recent Additions
- A radio drop-out zone with crossing pitch/roll ramp flooring to encourage mobile robots to demonstrate autonomous navigation capabilities in complex terrains.
- Payload delivery to encourage mobile manipulators using inverse kinematics to perform automatic payload grasping, tool changing, object retrieval, and precision placement tasks on complex terrains. Three items can be carried as payloads from the start, additional items can be grasped in the arena.
- Two-way communications tests to establish victim identification by a remote operator (and judge) using randomly spoken numbers played as audio files within victim boxes.
Mission Description
- Teams should queue at the paddock entry with their robot(s) and operator interface(s) prior to their scheduled start time.
- 15-30 minute missions include robot placement at the start point and operator station setup. Each team is responsible for making sure victims in the arenas are functional (heat, batteries, tags) prior to mission start.
- The operator station will be limited to a 120 cm wide x 60 cm deep desk with walls. Teams are allowed only one operator in the operator station at any time during missions. Teams may switch operators whenever necessary.
- All robot start points will be in or around the Yellow arena and facing the same direction (marked as “north” on your map). The initial direction may be facing a wall. Teams with multiple robots will be co-located at the start point (as near as possible) and facing the same direction.
- Victim placements will be known to the operators and audience prior to missions, and changed each round to ensure complete arena coverage over multiple missions.
- All teams should map the Yellow arena, but robots must perform autonomous navigation and victim identification to score Yellow arena victims. Operators may remotely teleoperate the robot at any time to navigate into the Orange and Red arenas but must return to the start point to resume autonomous searches to find Yellow arena victims.
- Teleoperative robots can only score Orange or Red arena victims, which are likely placed on both sides of the Yellow arena to encourage complete mapping of all arenas.
- An operator (or team leader) may request a “ROBOT RESET” to fix a robot during a mission, but suffers loss of accumulated victim points, maps, and elapsed time. The robot must re-start the mission from the initial mission start point and work for the remaining time available. The robot can be teleoperated to the start point to fix with no loss of points.
- GeoTiff maps are required and will be compared to ground truth for accuracy. Map quality will be based on Technical Committee review.
- Bumping penalties will be assessed if the administrator must replace or fix arena elements prior to next mission.
- The league will assign 802.11A channels for practice and missions. All league SSID’s must be “RRL-TEAMNAME”. No other radios using either 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz radio frequencies are allowed.
Mission Scoring
Robots must be within 1 meter directly in front of found victims to score points. Several key capabilities are specifically rewarded in the scoring metric. Since victims are distributed across all arenas, more capable robots have access to more victims. In general, up to 70 points are available per victim found:
Victims per Arena
- 4 Yellow (auto nav. & ID only)
- 4 Orange (auto or teleop)
- 4 Red (auto or teleop)
- 2 Radio Drop-Out Zone (auto nav.)
Points per Victim
- Visual Indentifications(10 pts)
- (5 pts) Hazmat labels
- (5 pts) Eye charts
- Other Detections(20 pts)
- (5 pts) Motion sensors
- (5 pts) Thermal sensors
- (5 pts) CO2 sensors
- (5 pts) Audio: victim ---> operator
- (5 pts) Audio: operator ---> victim
- Arena Mapping(20 pts)
- (10 pts) Quality of geotiff map
- (10 pts) Accuracy of victims
- Payload Delivery(20 pts)
- (20 pts) Placing of payloads blocks or bottles into found victim boxes.
- Penalties (-10 pts per event)
- Assessed when arena elements need to be replaced
RoboCup Rescue Complete Rule Book
- 2012 Rules-coming soon!
Qualification Process
The RoboCupRescue Robot League encourages participation by interested organizations from around the world, but limits participation to one team per organization. Regional open competitions are hosted around the world to provide essential practice deployment experience for teams and to support qualification of teams for the World Championship competition each year. The World Championship includes a maximum of 5 teams from each regional open competition, which are typically the three awardees and up to two more teams based on the previous year’s awards, Best-In-Class demonstrations in the current year, and other considerations noted below.
RoboCupRescue Robot League regional open competitions are hosted in Japan, Germany, Iran, Thailand, Mexico, and we are actively trying (but need help from locals) to establish regional open competitions in other areas as well. All teams should use regional open competitions to:
- Practice your deployment strategies,
- Familiarize yourselves with the arenas and rules, and
- Demonstrate your capabilities to the Technical Committee.
Unfortunately, due to the close scheduling of the regional open competitions and the World Championship each year, the qualification process can't be completely sequential because teams sometimes have trouble making it to the World Championship on short notice. So the Technical Committee qualifies an initial set of teams each year for the World Championship based on performance in the previous year’s competition and their updated team description papers. Teams that win a 1st, 2nd, or 3rd place award at any regional open competition and submit a team description paper are qualified for the World Championship competition in that year and the following year.
The Technical Committee usually keeps a few slots open in the World Championship competition to include additional capable teams that emerge from the regional open competitions each year. When there is no regional open competition in the region of the World Championship, the technical committee typically qualifies proportionally more teams from the local region, while encouraging them to try to participate in other regional open competitions as well. At large qualifications may also be granted for teams in regions without a regional open competition. Although it is clear that the best route to participate in a World Championship competition is to perform well in a regional open competition and write a good team description paper. You will find the lessons learned from both are well worth the effort.
Each year the Technical Committee looks at the following criteria to qualify teams for the World Championship:
- Your TDP which describes improvements to your robot based on lessons learned from the previous year’s competitions that produced a semi-final round appearance in the World Championship, a Best-In-Class award in the World Championship, or a Place award in a regional open.
- Your TDP describes a particularly interesting or innovative approach that the Technical Committee considers likely to perform well at the World Championship competition even without previous experience at a regional open competition, especially when there is not yet a regional open competition nearby to you. This is especially possible if you can demonstrate your capabilities convincingly within representative arena apparatuses through video of the robot performing any or all of the requisite capabilities:
- advanced mobility (traversing random stepfields or confined space cubes)
- navigation (wall following, centering between obstacles or constrictions)
- localization and mapping (2D/3D maps, SLAM on non-flat-flooring i.e. pitch/roll ramps, low-profile stepfields)
- directed perception (visual acuity for near/far/dark/light, sensor probing into voids, sometimes with reaching)
- victim identification (fusion of the various sensory signals to improve confidence and reduce errors)
- autonomy (assistive features, bounded intervals, or fully autonomous performance of any or all of the above)
- effective operator interfaces
Finally, some qualifications for the World Championship may be granted by the Technical Committee to include particular countries in the league, encourage technologies that the league should be investigating, or to support other league outreach efforts.
Teams
Pre-Qualified teams listed below. List will be updated once regional opens have been completed.
RoboCup 2012 Information
Location: Mexico City, Mexico Dates: June 18 - 24, 2012
Important Dates:
- January 20, 2012:
- Submit Team Participation Formto rescue.robot.league@el.nist.gov
- February 12, 2012:
- Submit Team Description Paperto rescue.robot.league@el.nist.gov
- March 15, 2012:
- Announcement of First Round Qualified Teams
RoboCup 2011 Scores
| Year | 1st Place Team | 2nd Place Team | 3rd Place Team | Media |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | iRAP_JUDY, Thailand | MRL, IRAN | STABILIZE, Thailand | video |
| Year | Best in Autonomy | Best in Manipulation | Best in Mobility | Media |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | CASualty, Australia | YRA, Iran | iRAP_Judy, Thailand | video |
RoboCup Champions
| Year | 1st Place Team | 2nd Place Team | 3rd Place Team | Media |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | iRAP_Pro, Thailand | BART LAB Rescue, Thailand | Success, Thailand (Tied for Second) | |
| 2009 | xxxxx | xxxxx | xxxxxx | video |
| Year | Best in Autonomy | Best in Manipulation | Best in Mobility | Media |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | CASualty, Australia | PELICAN, Japan | CASualty, Australia | |
| 2009 | xxxxx | xxxxx | xxxxxx | video |
Research State of the Art
Other Information
2011 Assembly Guide for RoboCup Elements
