Satellite Event: Open Humanoid Competition
The Humanoid League will hold a Satellite Event @ RoboCup 2022 Symposium called Open Humanoid Competition.
This event is organised as a discussion group with an intended length of two hours. It will be held on July 14, 2022, in Bangkok (Thailand), at 19:00 – 21:00 (local time).
The main driven purpose of this event is to create an initial process or a sub-event to the Humanoid League main competition that can ease the path for new teams and to guide them towards a final full participation.
The discussion group is open to every member of the different RoboCup leagues. We specifically aim at involving trustees, organisers and members of the Humanoid and Junior soccer leagues.
Statement of Objectives
The Humanoid League’s first games were played in 2002, and the competition initially consisted of technical challenges only. Since then, it progressively developed its scientific challenges to successfully meet the goal of RoboCup to play against the human world soccer champion in 2050. The required constraints and games’ rules in place since 2022 for enhancing these scientific challenges include the increasing of the number, dimensions (i.e. height) and expected autonomous capabilities of the robotic players. Such increasing scientific difficulties have been catching the attention and interest of researchers, but, at the same time, make it prohibitive for new and, in consequence, often less experienced teams to join the Humanoid League. The main difficulties faced by new teams are related both to the cost of taller robots, and the challenges of developing hardware and software for such taller robots. The new teams mainly enter the Humanoid League through the Kid size sub-league. As a consequence, the Humanoid League is facing a stagnation of participating teams.
In recent years, several local RoboCup events, such as RoboCup German Open, have been cancelled for a too low participation of Humanoid League’s teams. Other events, such as the German Open Replacement Event (GORE 2022), have been organised in collaboration with other leagues, such as Standard Platform for the GORE 2022, to overcome the low participation.
Moreover, we expect that costs for research, components and equipment for one or a full team of humanoid robots may soon become inapproachable for new teams (see most recent Roadmap).
For these reasons, we want to define and develop an initial process or a sub-event to the Humanoid League main competition that can ease the path for new teams and to guide them towards a final full participation.
In this satellite event for the 25th RoboCup International Symposium, we want to focus on addressing the challenges and development of the creation of this initial process to access the Humanoid League. To this extent, we will foster discussions between members of different Leagues, trustees, members of the Technical and Organising Committees to tackle some fundamental requirements to facilitate new teams to join the Humanoid League.