The RoboCup Federation (RCF) is excited to announce its call for proposals aimed at supporting initiatives to advance RoboCup Leagues.
The RCF Project Support initiative seeks to fund projects that enhance RoboCup Leagues or promote RoboCup on a broader scale. These projects aim to explore and implement activities that facilitate significant progress within the RoboCup community, endeavors that might otherwise be challenging to accomplish. This support extends to facilitating short-term collaborations between teams, such as joint development efforts or aligning research agendas, as well as organizing RoboCup camps focused on specialized or innovative topics.
In the current call for proposals, the RCF is particularly interested in projects addressing the following areas:
- Human-Robot Interaction (HRI): Exploring various forms of interaction between humans and robots within RoboCup leagues.
- Low-Cost Standard Robots: Proposals aimed at reducing barriers to entry for RoboCup leagues or enabling scalability in team sizes through cost-effective robot solutions.
- Unified Game Controllers: Developing game controllers that can be easily shared across different RoboCup leagues with minimal reconfiguration.
- Data Sets from Competitions: Ideas for automating the collection and annotation of data (i.e., ground truth) from competitions to facilitate statistical analysis or machine learning.
Support from the RCF will be provided either through reimbursement of direct expenses (e.g., hardware acquisition, event organization costs) or as a grant to successful applicants. Projects involving hardware acquisition must demonstrate how the acquired equipment will benefit the league or other teams.
Proposals, limited to a maximum of four pages, must be submitted as a single PDF file via the easychair system under the category “Projects for League Developments.” Each proposal should include:
- Project description.
- Motivations and goals.
- Benefits for RoboCup and its leagues, focusing on broader community impact.
- Implementation plan and budget breakdown.
A committee comprising RoboCup Trustees or RoboCup Exec members will evaluate the submitted proposals. Evaluation criteria include the quality and relevance of the proposed research, the applicants’ contributions to RoboCup, and the potential impact of the project on advancing RoboCup’s visibility and development.
The submission deadline is November 30th, 2022, with notifications expected by December 18th, 2022. Projects are anticipated to be presented in preliminary form during the RoboCup Symposium 2023, with final completion targeted by the end of 2023 and submission of a final report by January 2024. Requests for exceptions to these deadlines must be submitted to the evaluation committee for approval.