CALL FOR TENDER (Text version) >> PDF version

RoboCup Federation Call for Tenders:
A Standard Robot Platform for Robot Soccer

RoboCup is an international joint project to promote Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and related fields. It is an attempt to foster AI and intelligent robotics research by providing a standard problem where a wide range of technologies can be integrated and examined. RoboCup chose to use the game of soccer as a central topic of research, aiming at innovations to be applied for socially significant problems and industries.

The RoboCup competition includes leagues of different kinds of robots. Teams in the four-legged robot league use a standard robotic platform. The difference between the teams is in the game-playing software that they devise. The current platform is Sony’s Aibo entertainment robot. The RoboCup Federation is seeking expressions of interest for a new platform to succeed the Aibo. The characteristics being sought are:

• A standard platform
  • No hardware development should be required of the teams. Indeed, no hardware modifications should be allowed.
  • The robot must have an operating system and software development environment allowing full control of sensors and actuators.
  • The platform should be modular, permitting upgrades and modifications from year to year.
• Many degrees of freedom
  • Quadruped robots allow for a large variety of gaits and kicks. The new platform need not be a quadruped but it should have a sufficient number of degrees of freedom that teams can create interesting new behaviours and modes of locomotion.
• Directed Perception
  • The robot is required to have onboard colour vision but not an omnidirectional camera since we wish teams to develop methods for active perception.
• Full Autonomy
  • The robots are required to be fully autonomous. That is, they must have on-board computing resources sufficient to meet all processing requirements. No off-board computation is allowed.
  • The robots must operate with no intervention by team members and minimal intervention by referees.
  • Games typically consist of two half parts, each of them lasting for around 15mn, with a 10mn break. Onboard battery power must ensure that the robots require no recharge during each of those periods, and recharging should be as fast as possible.
• Wireless Communication
  • The robots must be capable of wireless 802.11 communications permitting the exchange of information between robots on the field.
• Physical characteristics
  • Ideally, the robot should be relatively small such that several can fit comfortably on one of the current RoboCup fields.
  • Robots that are visually appealing will be looked upon favourably.
• (optional) Compatibility with some available robot development software (e.g., Pyro, MS Robotics Studio software, Player/Stage, Teambots, Webots, or other, please mention)

Sales and support must be worldwide. There are approximately 40 teams in the current four-legged robot league from North and South America, Europe, Asia and Australia. As the game rules typically require each team to play with 4-5 robots, the selected platform has a great potential for a considerable number of sales. The tender should show evidence of the supplier's capacity to respond in a timely manner to a potentially large number of units for sale upon acceptance of their bid and of its capacity to respond in a timely and cost-effective (to the customer) manner to requests for service (hardware repairs and technical support). The suppliers should also include in their proposal an estimate of the robot’s cost to RoboCup teams.

It is intended that a demonstration of the robot will be presented for consideration at RoboCup 2007 in Atlanta, USA (http://www.robocup-us.org/) with the selected platform being introduced into the RoboCup competition in 2008.

The intended schedule is as follows:

1. Nov 13, 2006: Call for Tenders
2. Dec 31, 2006: Deadline for tenders to submit a proposal to the RoboCup Federation (RCF), by sending an email to office at robocup.org.
3. Jan 15, 2007: Announcement of short list of selected tenders
4. July 1-10, 2007: Platform demonstration at RoboCup2007, Atlanta, by the selected Tenders, followed by a decision by RCF on the selected platform Information about RoboCup can be found at http://www.robocup.org.

For further information about the tender, please contact Pedro Lima pal at isr.ist.utl.pt.