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From: Frederic Gruau <gruau@~gruau.cwi.nl>
Subject: ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PARTICIPATION ROBOTICS FOOTBALL TOURNAMENT DURING the 4th. EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL LIFE
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ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
ROBOTICS FOOTBALL TOURNAMENT DURING the 4th.
EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL LIFE 


ECAL97 Brighton, UK, July 28-31 1997 evenings 

Technology now makes it possible for robots to play football 
at a price of around 4000 US dollars per robot, (see the end
of this  note for a hint.) In an attempt to foster  research 
in this direction we define the rules of  an informal inter-
national robotics football tournament.  A football team will 
be a single small wheeled robot, preferably kheperas   (6 cm
diameter)  for a fair competition. The ball is a bright  yel-
-low tennis ball, the goal is 30 cm wide, 20cm high and light
gray. The playground is 70X90cm, colored black. The robot must
 appear as a cylinder, 6cm diameter, 15cm high, with interlea-
-ved vertical stripes black and white, one inch wide. 

No fee, no program committee, no papers, no reviewing, no regis-
tration:  let the people who come, play: and let the best win. 

Any techniques are allowed: direct programming, machine learning,
 or both in combination. Consult our web site for a precise des-
-cription of the rules. First prize  will be 100  dollars plus a 
gift from each participating team plus some money from our spon-
-sors. We will also get the TV involved. A well publicized web 
page will be created as an additional reward, showing the rank of
 participating teams, with pointers to home pages, and/or research
reports. Competition takes place July 28 - 31,  in the  evenings, 
during ECAL 97, (European Conference on Artificial Life at Bri-
-ghton, Sussex.) Teams must come  to the conference on the first 
day, so that we can organize all the matches. 

WWW site:    http://www.cwi.nl/~gruau/football.html
Email:       gruau@cwi.nl
Organizers:  Fred Gruau and Phil Husbands.

HINT: Kheperas  equipped with CCD camera  (64 pixels, 256 gray levels) 
cost 4000 dollars. With  the  preceding experimental setting , (black
playground, light gray goal, cylindrical  robot with  black and white
strips) we made measurements showing that the khepera  is indeed able
to distinguish between the ball, the goal, and its opponent. A khepe-
-ra is reflected by the CCD camera as a two or three  sharp little 
peaks, a ball as
a round, thick and high peak, and the goal  as a nice rectangle. 

Rules of the Game 

In  contrast to  the football robotics  contest  MICROSOT'96,  where the
organizers  devised real football rules, the rules  of the ECAL contest 
are the simplest as possible. We believe that before elaborating complex
team strategies, the khepera must first  quickly an reliably: 
  1) find where the ball is and go next to  it,
  2) know where the opposite goal is and distinguish it from its own
goal, 
  3) push the ball toward the opposite goal.

 The rules are as follows: 
  1) A match consists of seven periods of five minutes. 
  2) The initial position and angle of the kheperas and the ball are
chosen randomly. 
  3) A period stops if the ball is in one of the two goals 
  4) or after 2 minutes if the ball has not been touched by  neither
kheperas. 
  5) Scoring is 1 point per goal, no penalties, the points will be added
