Hi All!
I hope you have all had a good start to 2019!
On behalf of the RoboCup Rescue Rapidly Manufactured Robot Challenge
(RMRC) Committee, I would like to announce the initial Call for
Participation for the RMRC World Championships, to be held in Sydney
this July!
The RMRC is a bracket of the broader RoboCup Rescue Robot League
(RRL), a competition where teams build robots and run them through an
arena based on DHS-NIST-ASTM International Standard Test Methods for
Response Robots. These tests reflect real-world requirements for
response robots, such as those used by bomb squads, search and rescue
teams and hazardous materials responders all over the world. Thus, teams
that do well in this competition are also solving real-world problems.
The broader RRL is a Major, Open competition and consists mainly of teams of university research students at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. The RMRC extends this to include high school students. Teams of up to 6 students (between the ages of 13 and 19 on the 1st of July, 2019) and up to 2 mentors (1 mentor for teams of 3 or fewer students, no age restriction) can compete among themselves while continuing to maintain a connection with the broader RRL.
We are in the process of updating the details on our website but in the meantime, please visit http://comp.oarkit.org/ for details from previous years.
There are a few new features of the 2019 competition. We will be
posting to the list additional details and opportunities to discuss
these shortly as we update the rules and guidelines but for now, here
are some of the highlights!
– In addition to the 30 cm lanes of previous years, we will be
providing a few 60 cm lanes! These will be scaled up in all dimensions
by a factor of 2 (including height) and provide an opportunity for
larger robots to demonstrate their capabilities. We will be voting on
which lanes to provide scaled-up versions of shortly. During
preliminaries, these will be considered separate lanes for the purpose
of scoring. During the finals, these will be incorporated into the arena
just like any other lane (subject to physical constraints). At this
stage, resource and space permitting, we expect around 1/3 of the
available lanes to be at 60 cm scale so it is highly recommended that
even if a team is looking to focus on the 60 cm scale, that their robot
at least fits in the 30 cm lane in order to be competitive.
– One of the new criteria on which the Qualification Team Description
Materials (TDM) will be evaluated will be innovation shown by the
students, as distinct from innovation provided by mentors, sponsoring
organisations and/or equipment suppliers. We realize that high schools
and technical colleges have a wide variety of capabilities and that some
are able to leverage sponsorship from organisations and companies so we
have some flexibility in this criteria.
In general, we recommend that teams make use of equipment and
facilities that can be accessed at a well equipped high school,
technical college or makerspace. In addition to laser cutting and 3D
printing, this may include conventional CNC machining, custom circuit
board fabrication, hobbyist/maker level off-the-shelf modules (or those
that made available to high schools by manufacturers and other
organisations under broader education or sponsorship programs) and
hobbyist/maker level pre-made robot platforms.
If a team has access to professional robot platforms (eg. through
collaboration or sponsorship with a responder organisation or
manufacturer) they must demonstrate that they have added something
innovative to their entry. This need not necessarily be physical,
demonstrating a particularly innovative evaluation and/or operator
training regime is also welcome. If in doubt, please post to this
mailing list and we can have a discussion.
– In past years, we have given an Open Source and Innovation award.
This year, to encourage greater contribution to the growing body of
knowledge, we are turning this into a preliminary score multiplier for
all teams, in the form of the Updated TDM, due 2 weeks prior to
competition. See below for details!
– We have a Discord server! All team members, mentors and interested parties are welcome to join and discuss the competition, share tips and tricks, ask questions and generally get to know each other. We anticipate that this will also be a useful tool for communicating within and between teams, and between competitors and organisers, during the competition. Go to http://comp.oarkit.org/ and follow the links to join us! Note that all competition announcements, including rulings and similar decisions, will be posted to this mailing list so you won’t miss any important competition announcements if you don’t join (or keep up with) the Discord server but you may miss the opportunity to shape the development of the competition!
Here is the general qualification timetable:
2019-02-17, Team Participation Form (TPF) due.
2019-03-17, Qualification TDM due.
2019-04-15, Notification of Qualification.
2019-06-18, Updated TDM due.
2019-07-02, RoboCup starts in Sydney!
Further details:
TPF, due 2019-02-17:
Please visit http://comp.oarkit.org for a link to the Google form where you can submit your TPF! This document helps us to plan capacity. Filling this in doesn’t oblige you to field a team so please fill this in even if you’re only thinking of participating. Conversely, it is possible to participate without filling in a TPF although teams that qualify without having submitted a TPF by the deadline will only be admitted if there is space (and may delay notification).
Teams who qualify based on performance in the 2018 competition should
still fill in the TPF by the deadline and, if not submitting from the
same contact email address as in 2018, should send us an email from the
2018 contact email advising us of the new contact email.
Qualification TDM, due 2019-03-17:
The Qualification TDM is the primary way by which we select teams for
the World Championships in Sydney. This document should tell us who you
are, what you have done and what you plan to do. We will be publishing
the list of points that we expect to be covered shortly, they will be
broadly similar to the 2018 points available from http://comp.oarkit.org
.
We will be looking for an understanding of the challenges involved
and an indication that you have some good ideas on how to solve them. We
do realise that we have both old and new teams and not everyone will
have something built by the deadline, we will be taking this into
account. We are flexible in the format of your Qualification TDM. This
can be a traditional document, a series of blog posts, a video and/or
something else. Do make sure that all the points are easy to find
though, if we have to search all through a long list of blog posts or
view a long video, there’s a good chance we’ll miss a few!
Teams who qualify based on performance in the 2018 competition should
still fill in the Qualification TDM by the deadline. If this is not
submitted from the
same contact email address as in 2018 (and a change wasn’t advised
during the TPF process), they should send us an email from the
2018 contact email advising us of the new contact email.
Updated TDM, due 2019-06-18:
NEW! THE SCORE YOU GET FOR YOUR UPDATED TDM WILL FORM A MULTIPLIER ONTO YOUR PRELIMINARY SCORE!
Teams that qualify for the World Championships should submit an updated TDM by the 18th of June, 2 weeks prior to the competition. By then, you should have a good idea of what you have built and what you will field at the competition. This document will be scored by the RMRC Committee based on how useful and informative it is for a new team to learn from and build off what you have done. This will be archived and published prior to the competition, along with the score awarded.
This can be in any form that we can download and archive (to guard
against links going dead in the future). Having said that, there will be
points allocated to how easy it is to read/view and understand. Well
documented source, CAD, circuit and other related files are worth
points, particularly when published under a suitable open source
license. We will be discussing our scoring guidelines for this shortly
so watch this list!
Note that we may admit additional teams who miss the
TPF/Qualification TDM deadline if
they display exceptional performance and/or potential. Generally, this
will be because the team has demonstrated performance at other
competitions and testing events for which the outcomes are not known
prior to these deadlines. Regardless of the route of qualification, all
teams should submit an Updated TDM by the 18th of June deadline. Teams
that do not submit this document, or do not meet this deadline, will
have a scoring multiplier that will be a significant handicap in the
competition.
We are in the process of updating the rules and guidelines of the
competition so please watch this list for further details and
opportunities to add your input!
Cheers!
– Raymond and the rest of the RMRC Committee.
P.S. If you’re not already on our mailing list, please see http://list.oarkit.org for details!