To ensure consistent progress in the league, the Technical Committee regularly publishes roadmaps to indicate scheduled developments. By announcing rule changes several years in advance, teams have the opportunity to schedule these changes within their other developments.
While the Technical Committee aims to describe changes in as much detail as possible in this roadmap, the actual implementation will be performed by the Technical Committee of the given year. This may mean that small discrepancies may occur between the proposal and the actual implementation. The Technical Committee will work to keep any discrepancies as small as possible. When proposals are unclear or inconsistent, make sure to contact the Technical Committee (rc-msl-tc@lists.robocup.org). They will be able to provide clarifications, and, if necessary, update the roadmap and/or rulebook.
Philosophy
- Whilst keeping the goals of the MSL in mind, some additional constraints and guidelines are formulated for defining this roadmap.
- Changes should progress the league and promote broad research, allowing researchers to choose their own research directions.
- Roadmap items may force developments on teams, but only if this is in the interest of making league development possible.
- All changes for one year together should reflect a workload that can reasonably be expected from all teams. Different types of changes (e.g., hardware and software) should, if possible, have a balanced workload each year.
- Forced hardware changes should be planned such that teams can plan to gradually incorporate it with normal hardware upgrades and maintenance.
- Whenever possible, the primary focus of changes should be getting better at playing attractive football. Until the MSL can play an attractive, evenly matched game against humans, changes should not be adding constraints to align the robot capabilities to those of humans, i.e., until that time, robots may use their unique abilities (e.g., wheels, WiFi) to compete. Constraints should only be added for cases where safety for humans and fairness between teams is at risk.