Interview with Marek Šuppa: insights into RoboCupJunior

A RoboCupJunior soccer match in motion.

In July this yr, 2500 individuals congregated in Bordeaux for RoboCup2023. The competitors contains quite a few leagues, and amongst them is RoboCupJunior, which is designed to introduce RoboCup to highschool youngsters, with the main focus being on schooling. There are three sub-leagues: Soccer, Rescue and OnStage.

Marek Šuppa serves on the Government Committee for RoboCupJunior, and he informed us in regards to the competitors this yr and the newest developments within the Soccer league.

What’s your function in RoboCupJunior and the way lengthy have you ever been concerned with this league?

I began with RoboCupJunior fairly some time in the past: my first worldwide competitors was in 2009 in Graz, the place I used to be fortunate sufficient to compete in Soccer for the primary time. Our group didn’t do all that properly in that occasion however RoboCup made a deep impression and so I stayed round: first as a competitor and later to assist organise the RoboCupJunior Soccer league. Proper now I’m serving as a part of the RoboCupJunior Execs who’re accountable for the organisation of RoboCupJunior as an entire.

How was the occasion this yr? What have been a number of the highlights?

I suppose this yr’s theme or slogan, if we have been to present it one, could be “again to regular”, or one thing like that. Though RoboCup 2022 already occurred in-person in Thailand final yr after two years of a pandemic pause, it was in a relatively restricted capability, as COVID-19 nonetheless affected fairly a number of areas. It was nice to see that the RoboCup neighborhood was capable of persevere and even thrive all through the pandemic, and that RoboCup 2023 was as soon as once more an occasion the place hundreds of robots and roboticists meet.

It will even be troublesome to do that query justice with out thanking the native French organisers. They have been really able to organise the occasion in 2020 however it bought cancelled on account of COVID-19. However they didn’t surrender on the concept and managed to place collectively an superior occasion this yr, for which we’re very grateful.

Examples of the robots utilized by the RoboCupJunior Soccer groups.

Turning to RoboCupJunior Soccer particularly, may you speak in regards to the mission of the league and the way you, as organisers, go about realising that mission?

The mission of RoboCupJunior consists of two competing targets: on one hand, it must be a problem that’s approachable, attention-grabbing and related for (largely) highschool college students and on the identical time it must be carefully associated to the RoboCup “Main” challenges, that are tackled by college college students and their mentors. We’re therefore constantly attempting to each make it extra compelling and fascinating for the scholars and on the identical time guarantee it’s technical sufficient to assist them develop in the direction of the RoboCup “Main” challenges.

One of many methods we do that’s by introducing what we name “SuperTeam” challenges, during which groups from respective international locations kind a so-called “SuperTeam” and compete towards one other “SuperTeam” as if these have been distinct groups. In RoboCupJunior Soccer the “SuperTeams” are composed of 4 to 5 groups they usually compete on a subject that’s six instances bigger than the “normal” fields which can be used for the person video games. Whereas within the particular person matches every group can play with two robots at most (leading to a 2v2 sport) in a SuperTeam match every SuperTeam fields 5 robots, that means there are 10 robots that play on the SuperTeam subject throughout a SuperTeam match. The setup is similar to the Division B of the Small Dimension League of RoboCup “Main”.

The SuperTeam video games have existed in RoboCupJunior Soccer since 2013, so for fairly some time, and the suggestions we obtained on them was overwhelmingly constructive: it was a whole lot of enjoyable for each the individuals in addition to the spectators. However in comparison with the Small Dimension League video games there have been nonetheless two noticeable variations: the robots didn’t have a method of speaking with each other and moreover, the referees didn’t have a method of speaking with the robots. The end result was that not solely was there little coordination amongst robots of the identical SuperTeam, every time the sport wanted to be stopped, the referees needed to bodily run after the robots on the sector to catch them and do a kickoff after a objective was scored. Though hilarious, it’s removed from how we’d think about the SuperTeam video games to look.

The RoboCupJunior Soccer Commonplace Communication Modules intention to do each. The module itself is a small machine that’s hooked up to every robotic on the SuperTeam subject. These units are all linked through Bluetooth to a single smartphone, via which the referee can ship instructions to all robots on the sector. The units themselves additionally help direct message trade between robots on a single SuperTeam, that means the groups don’t have to take a position into determining easy methods to talk with the opposite robots however could make use of a standard platform. The units, in addition to their firmware, are open supply, that means not solely that everybody can construct their very own Commonplace Communication Module in the event that they’d like but additionally that the neighborhood can take part in its improvement, which makes it an attention-grabbing addition to RoboCupJunior Soccer.

RoboCupJunior Soccer groups preparing for the competitors.

How did this new module work out within the competitors? Did you see an enchancment in expertise for the groups and organisers?

On this first huge public check we targeted on exploring how (and whether or not) these modules can enhance the gameplay – particularly the “chasing robots at kickoff”. Though we’ve completed “lab experiments” up to now and had some empirical proof that it ought to work relatively properly, this was the primary time we tried it in an actual competitors.

All in all, I’d say that it was a really constructive experiment. The modules themselves did work fairly properly and for a few of us, who occurred to have expertise with “robotic chasing” talked about above, it was type of a magical feeling to see the robots cease proper on the principle referee’s whistle.

We additionally came upon potential areas for enchancment sooner or later. The modules themselves don’t have an influence supply of their very own and have been powered by the robots themselves. We didn’t assume this is able to be an issue however within the “actual world” check it transpired that the voltage ranges the robots are able to offering fluctuates considerably – as an illustration when the robotic decides to aggressively speed up – which in flip means a number of the modules disconnect when the voltage is lowered considerably. Nevertheless, it ended up being a pleasant lesson for everybody concerned, one which we will definitely be taught from after we design the following iterations.

The livestream from Day 4 of RoboCupJunior Soccer 2023. This stream consists of the SuperTeam finals and the technical challenges. You too can view the livestream of the semifinals and finals from day three right here.

May you inform us in regards to the emergence of deep-learning fashions within the RoboCupJunior leagues?

That is one thing we began to watch in recent times which shocked us organisers, to some extent. In our day-to-day jobs (that’s, when we’re not organising RoboCup), many people, the organisers, work in areas associated to robotics, pc science, and engineering typically – with a few of us additionally doing analysis in synthetic intelligence and machine studying. And whereas we at all times thought that it will be nice to see extra of the cutting-edge analysis being utilized at RoboCupJunior, we at all times dismissed it as one thing too superior and/or troublesome to arrange for the highschool college students that comprise nearly all of RoboCupJunior college students.

Properly, to our nice shock, a number of the extra superior groups have began to utilise strategies and applied sciences which can be very near the present state-of-the-art in numerous areas, significantly pc imaginative and prescient and deep studying. A superb instance could be object detectors (normally based mostly on the YOLO structure), which are actually used throughout all three Junior leagues: in OnStage to detect numerous props, robots and people who carry out on the stage collectively, in Rescue to detect the victims the robots are rescuing and in Soccer to detect the ball, the objectives, and the opponents. And whereas the individuals usually used an off-the-shelf implementations, they nonetheless wanted to do all of the steps crucial for a profitable deployment of this know-how: collect a dataset, finetune the deep-learning mannequin and deploy it on their robots – all of which is much from trivial and may be very near how these applied sciences get utilized in each analysis and trade.

Though we now have seen solely the extra superior groups use deep-learning fashions at RoboCupJunior, we anticipate that sooner or later we’ll see it turn into rather more prevalent, particularly because the know-how and the tooling round it turns into extra mature and sturdy. It does present, nevertheless, that regardless of their age, the RoboCupJunior college students are very near cutting-edge analysis and state-of-the-art applied sciences.

Motion from RoboCupJunior Soccer 2023.

How can individuals get entangled in RCJ (both as a participant or an organiser?)

An excellent query!

The perfect place to begin could be the RoboCupJunior web site the place one can discover many attention-grabbing particulars about RoboCupJunior, the respective leagues (reminiscent of Soccer, Rescue and OnStage), and the related regional representatives who organise regional occasions. Getting in contact with a regional consultant is by far the simplest method of getting began with RoboCup Junior.

Moreover, I can definitely suggest the RoboCupJunior discussion board, the place many RoboCupJunior individuals, previous and current, in addition to the organisers, focus on many associated subjects within the open. The neighborhood may be very newbie pleasant, so if RoboCupJunior sounds attention-grabbing, don’t hesitate to cease by and say hello!

About Marek Šuppa

Marek stumbled upon AI as a teen when constructing soccer-playing robots and rapidly realised he’s not sensible sufficient to do all of the programming by himself. Since then, he’s been determining methods to make machines be taught by themselves, significantly from textual content and pictures. He at the moment serves because the Principal Knowledge Scientist at Slido (a part of Cisco), bettering the way in which conferences are run around the globe. Staying true to his roots, he tries to supply others with an opportunity to have an identical expertise by organising the RoboCupJunior competitors as a part of the Government Committee.