Proposal for ROS Sports Community Working Group

General
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Sports Competitions for Robots have been around for a while. You may know all about it or it may strike you as something completely new, but robotics competitions exist for soccer, badminton, sumo, wrestling, table tennis, and many more. Robot sports provides extreme environments that push the boundaries of robotics in ways other branches of robotics don’t.

I’m Kenji Brameld (or @ijnek) and I used to participate in RoboCup as a former leader of Team rUNSWift in the Soccer Standard Platform League. While competitions like RoboCup aim to promote research in cutting-edge robotics and AI, unfortunately many teams develop custom solutions to general robotics problems, which:

  • increases code-base maintenance burden for the team
  • doesn’t make it easier for new teams to join the competition
  • isn’t published (the code) in a way that benefits the rest of the robotics community

ROS Sports is an organization that was set up this year to tackle this problem by aiming to develop, release and maintain high-quality foundational ROS 2 packages for robotic sports.

It consists of a group of individuals that wanted to develop packages that can be reused between teams in the competition, and also be reused outside the competition domain. In contrast to a competitive team, we purely focus on advancement of the competitions and contributions to the wider robotics community. So far we have released nine packages amongst others listed here, and we are looking to grow!

We propose starting a community working group for Robot Sports. I know many ROS community members are/have been involved in competitions like RoboCup, so if you share a similar vision, or have some thoughts, let’s get together and discuss it!

Is robot sports useful to the rest of the ROS community? - Absolutely, if you read the blog in the discourse post from the Hamburg Bit-Bots RoboCup team, it is packed with valuable insight in using ROS 2, that apply to a wide variety of robotics projects. That team has been involved in designing a variety of packages for the wider robotics community, and has made many contributions in the form of feature additions / bug fixes to core ROS 2 repositories too. We’re hoping other members of the community can join us in making research reusable for the wider robotics community!

We currently have the following collaborators:

If this lies within your interest, we’d like to hear from you. Please share your thoughts in this thread!

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Didn’t know about ros-sports. Colour me interested! I am currently in the process of making a kart racing competition (in a private repo for only a few more weeks), so your work could prove to be quite substantial to me! I will definitely keep an eye on the future of this initiative and/or the working group! Keep it up!

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Hi @Kenji_Brameld,

Wonderful initiative!

We, at Cyberbotics, would love to participate to this WG as we believe we can contribute to ROS Sport simulation setups and infrastructure.

Recently, we actively contributed RoboCup by developing the simulation setup for the Virtual Humanoid Soccer Competition. Also, we have been developing and helping others to develop their own simulation-based robot competitions for the past 20 years. Here are some examples:

We are currently about to release some new optimized simulation/web open-source technology that will further facilitate the use, setup and deployment of simulation-based robot competitions, including support for ROS 2. We would be happy to help ROS Sports competition organizers to use this open-source technology and adapt it to their needs.

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@gstavrinos and @olivier.michel thank you for sharing your work, it is great to see Cyberbotics supporting this initiative.

Following the suggestions of making a ROS community working group, I have created a mailing list. It is set up such that:

  • Anyone can join
  • No one can post (aka only owners)
  • Anyone can view members

The mailing list will be used to distribute the google calendar invitations only. Please add yourself to the mailing list.

We should also discuss the time and agenda for the first meeting here. I suggest having the first meeting at UTC 9:00PM on the 22nd of August.

I would like to discuss the following points:

  • Self Introduction of members
  • Subjects covered by working group
  • Communication Channels (Discord, Discourse, etc.)
  • Roles (members, reviewers and leads)
  • Maintenance Guidelines and Package Quality

Please reply with points you want to see added to the agenda!

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That’s a bit late for me. Could we advance it by two hours or so?

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@olivier.michel
Advancing it by 2 hours makes it difficult for me in the Japan time zone (makes it 4am).

With the existing members I listed above (which are all from Germany), it’ll be good to find a time that works between many of us.

It might make it harder from our friends in the US, but would UTC 9:00AM on the 22nd of August work better?

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That would be perfect for me.

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As an FYI when talking about times in Discourse. I recommend using the time macro in Discourse which will help with user’s timezone localization. Such as

2022-08-22T09:00:00Z which will render in the users local time for their convenience.

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Thanks @tfoote, using the macro, the currently proposed meeting time would be:

2022-08-22T09:00:00Z

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The link for the meeting has been emailed out to the ros sports mailing list, and for those that aren’t in the mailing list, you can also join from this link.

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The Meeting Notes and Video Recording are now available! I’ll try and improve on the video recording in future meetings. :sweat_smile:

ROS Sports Discord server is getting set up - Join Here!

Future meetings will be held on-demand, and will be preceded by a ROS Discourse announcement. Special thanks to those that came along to the first meeting!

For those that missed out on the meeting, check up on the meeting notes and join us on discord!

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