IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2021 - 116

interactions among RoboCuppers,
poster presentations, and videos of
the competitions.
These platforms proved to be very
appropriate for our goals of keeping the
community engaged and, at the same
time, running competitive challenges.
The main issue was to align the requirements
of RoboCup games (which are
quite different from typical conferences)
with such tools that are mostly designed
for standard academic conferences.
The volunteer contributions of members
of the RoboCup 2021 OC with the
technical support of the Underline staff
led to appropriately customized versions
of the online platforms that enabled us
to host a very successful online event.
The OCs and TCs from each league provided
content for these platforms (such
as schedule, results, and videos) to make
the games and challenges accessible to
the participating teams as well as to the
general audience.
They also worked together to create
an extraordinary virtual world in
Gather Town with many areas and
rooms where people could have meetings,
discussions, or even linger for
hours in a friendly environment with
other participants. For example, in
RoboCupJunior,
the virtual world
included a beach for relaxing and a
room of virtual games for youngsters
(see Figures 1 and 2).
The Competition Rules
Each of the leagues responded in its
own unique way to the presented challenge
of creating rules for a fully distributed
competition, as described in the
section " The Competition Challenges. "
In this section, we summarize a few of
these responses.
The Humanoid League aimed to create
a virtual world where all robots
could be modeled and all soccer competitions
could occur. It was successfully
made in the Webots environment with
features designed specifically for RoboCup
Soccer games, such as a field with
grass, realistic physics for ball kicking,
and motor backlash. A short video of
such games is available online (https://
youtu.be/sYTp1X3nGuE). In the Small
Size League, the virtual world and
remote challenges worked well together.
Teams competed in a simulated environment,
but they also needed to show,
in real time, some hardware performing
in the team's laboratory with real robots.
The Soccer SPL came up with a very
novel concept of distributed real robot
games with remote participation. Six
fields were installed in different geographical
locations with standard
dimensions. Teams then sent their code
to the local hosts, who were able to run
the code on their own robots. Challenges
and one-versus-one robot games
were successfully performed, requiring
teams to address several technical challenges,
including remote setup and calibration
of the robots. An image of the
Passing Challenge is shown in Figure 3.
The far robot and the near robot
needed to pass the ball back and forth
without hitting the two robots in the
middle, while staying within the square
marked in green. More details about
the competition format are available in
[5], while videos of the games are available
on the SPL YouTube channel
(https://www.youtube.com/channel/
UCmJWzHyCuBs8zaQcJfw077g).
The RoboCup@Home league opted
for a competition based entirely in simulation.
A simulation environment,
based on Robot Operating System and
Gazebo, was developed to reproduce
an apartment-like scenario with the
elements needed to run the tasks
described in the rulebook (see Figure
4). The framework developed for
the competition also included an automatic
referee and scoring module,
allowing for completely automated
management of the competition runs.
The simulation environment, released
using Docker technology, proved to be
very effective for competition organizers
and usable for the teams. It could be
very useful in the future for new teams,
qualification purposes, and running
specific challenges. Ongoing simulator
development will focus on implementing
advanced forms of human-robot
interaction. More details are given in [6].
RoboCup@Home and RoboCup@
Work jointly hosted the Virtual Robot
Manipulation Challenge, supported
by MathWorks. The focus of this challenge
was to attract new teams by providing
them a virtual machine already
configured to run a manipulation task,
MATLAB code to control the manipulation
robot, and webinars and technical
support for the teams to help them
in developing the solutions. Similarly,
RoboCup@HomeEducation targeted
younger students with workshops,
webinars, and remote technical support
to perform simplified tasks.
Figure 1. The main room in the RoboCup 2021 Gather Town virtual space.
116 * IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE * DECEMBER 2021
Event Summary
The virtual event was a huge success.
There were 12 Major Leagues, three
Junior Leagues, and additional challenges
aiming at bridging the Major
and Junior sections. (Details are available
at https://2021.robocup.org/
participants/call-for-participation.)
The event comprised 137 Major teams
and 180 Junior teams from 43 Regions,
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmJWzHyCuBs8zaQcJfw077g https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmJWzHyCuBs8zaQcJfw077g http://www.youtu.be/sYTp1X3nGuE http://www.youtu.be/sYTp1X3nGuE https://2021.robocup.org/participants/call-for-participation https://2021.robocup.org/participants/call-for-participation
IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2021

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