Re: [robocup-rescue-s] Complaint: Reply from Technical Committee

From: Cameron Skinner <cam@cs.auckland.ac.nz>
Date: Wed 10 May 2006 - 23:00:58 GMT

To all Robocuppers,

The changes to the kernel and simulators made in 2006 have been almost
entirely for purposes of stability and reliability. There are a small
number of exceptions which are detailed below:

1) HP and damage rounding. This feature was introduced on 31/1/06 in
version 0.49alpha to prevent teams from having a perfect "estimation" of
the state of a civilian. In 2005 it was noted that at least one team
stopped rescuing civilians when they had determined that no more
civilians would die. This is a totally unrealistic situation. In a real
environment it is not possible to *completely* determine the state of
any object in the world.

To make the simulation more realistic it was decided that rounding the
HP/DAMAGE values sent to agents would make it difficult to determine the
exact state of a civilian, as would be the case in real life.

It is the opinion of the technical committee that this change is not a
major one and teams should not be significantly disadvantaged by this
change.

The committee also notes that this feature was released 5 months before
the competition. We feel that this is sufficient time for teams to adapt
to the new environment.

2) Randomised fuel loads and fuel consumption. Similar to the rounded
hp/damage, this feature was introduced to make it more difficult to
determine the state of the fire simulator. It changes the fire simulator
from a completely deterministic process to a stochastic one. Again, the
technical committee notes that this is more realistic and that the
change is minor and should not significantly disadvantage any teams.

3) The next version (0.49.6) which is due to be released soon contains
one additional building property: building temperature. This is a
discretised value taken directly from the fire simulator. Teams are free
to ignore this property if they wish.

The technical committee wishes to stress that this feature does *not*
affect the way any of the simulators function. It will not affect the
fire model, nor will it affect any of the other data sent to agents.
This extra property provides some additional information that teams may
or may not find useful.

4) The remaining changes in the 0.49.x release series are all bug fixes
or architecture changes. The only significant change that will affect
teams is the communication protocol change. The technical committee
estimates that it would take at most 5 hours work for teams to modify
their communication libraries to work with the 0.49.x architecture. The
librescue and rescuecore libraries provide reference implementations of
the protocol in C++ and java respectively.

You can see that there are really only three changes that affect teams.
These changes are all minor and are aimed at enhancing the realism of
the simulation and at making the simulation software more stable.

*There will be no more functional changes to the kernel or simulators
before the 2006 competition.* Bug fixes will still be made and further
releases beyond 0.49.6 are possible if major bugs are discovered.

The technical committee's goal is to run a fair, open and interesting
competition and to work towards the Simulation League goal of eventually
performing *real* urban search and rescue missions. The changes that
have been made in 2006 are aimed at achieving these goals.

Finally, the committee notes that the 0.49.x series of releases have
been available since 31/1/06. Teams have been notified of each release
and asked to test each version. To date, 6 bugs have been reported since
31/1/06.

Teams should be aware that the version used at the 2006 competition will
be from the 0.49.x release series and *will* use the new communication
protocols. It is the responsibility of teams to ensure that their agents
work with this version of the kernel.

Regards,
The Technical Committee.
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Received on Thu May 11 01:25:42 2006

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