Interview with Marek Šuppa: Insights into RoboCupJunior

The RoboCupJunior football game is underway.

This July, 2,500 participants gathered in Bordeaux for RoboCup 2023. The competition consists of several leagues, including RoboCupJunior, which focuses on education and is designed to introduce RoboCup to school children. There are three lower leagues: Soccer, Rescue, and OnStage.

Marek Šuppa serves on the Executive Committee of RoboCupJunior and spoke about this year’s competition and the latest developments in the football league.

What is your role at RoboCupJunior and how long have you been involved in this league?

I started RoboCupJunior quite a while ago. My first international competition was in Graz in 2009, where I had the good fortune to participate in my first ever football competition. My team didn’t do very well at the event, but RoboCup impressed me and I stayed. First as a competitor and later helping to organize the RoboCupJunior Soccer league. Currently, I am working as a member of the RoboCup Junior executive in charge of the entire RoboCup Junior organization.

How was this year’s event? What were some of the highlights?

If I had to choose a theme or slogan for this year, I think it would be ‘return to normal’. RoboCup 2022 was already held in person in Thailand last year after a two-year pandemic hiatus, but its scale was somewhat limited as COVID-19 was still affecting significant parts of the region. It was great to see that the RoboCup community was able to persevere and even thrive during the pandemic, and that RoboCup 2023 is once again the event where thousands of robots and roboticists meet.

It would be difficult to properly address this question without also thanking the local French organizers. The event was originally set to be held in 2020, but the event was canceled due to COVID-19. But they didn’t give up on the idea and have put together a great event this year, for which we are very grateful.

RoboCupJunior An example of a robot used by the soccer team.

Using RoboCupJunior Soccer specifically as an example, can you talk about the league’s mission and how you, as an organizer, bring that mission to life?

RoboCupJunior’s mission consists of two competing goals: On the one hand, it should be an approachable, interesting and relevant challenge for (mainly) high school students, while at the same time being closely related to the RoboCup “Major”. This is a task that college students and mentors solve. Therefore, we continually strive to make it more persuasive and engaging for students, while also ensuring that the content is technical enough to help students grow toward RoboCup “main” challenges.

One way to do this is to introduce the “SuperTeam” challenge, where teams from each country form a so-called “SuperTeam” and compete against other “SuperTeams” as if they were different teams. In RoboCupJunior Soccer, “superteams” are made up of four or five teams and compete in stadiums six times larger than the “standard” stadiums used for individual games. In individual matches, each team can play with up to two robots (2v2 games), but in SuperTeam matches, each SuperTeam fields five robots. This means there are 10 robots playing on the SuperTeam field during a SuperTeam match. The setup is very similar to Division B of the RoboCup minor league ‘Major’.

SuperTeam games have been around RoboCupJunior Soccer since 2013, so the feedback we’ve received about them for quite some time has been overwhelmingly positive. It was a lot of fun for both participants and spectators. However, there are still two differences that are noticeable compared to small-size league matches. There was no way for the robots to communicate with each other, and additionally, there was no way for the referee to communicate with the robots. As a result, not only was there little cooperation between robots on the same superteam, but whenever the game had to be stopped, the referees had to physically chase down the robots on the field, run to them, grab them, and kick off after a goal was scored. Although it’s fun, it’s not quite what we imagine a SuperTeam game would look like.

The RoboCupJunior Soccer standard communications module aims to do both. The module itself is a small device that attaches to each robot on a SuperTeam site. These devices all connect to a single smartphone via Bluetooth, which allows the referee to send commands to all the robots on the field. The device itself also supports direct message exchange between robots in a single SuperTeam. This means teams can leverage a common platform without having to invest in figuring out how to communicate with other robots. The device and firmware are open source, allowing anyone to build their own standard communication modules if they wish, as well as allowing the community to participate in the development, making it an exciting addition to RoboCupJunior Soccer. .

The RoboCupJunior soccer team is preparing for the competition.

How did this new module perform in competitions? Has the team and organizer experience improved?

In our first large-scale public testing, we focused on exploring how (and whether) these modules could improve gameplay, especially “Robot Chase at Kickoff.” We’ve done “lab experiments” in the past and have empirical evidence that it might work pretty well, but this was the first time we’ve tried it in a real competition.

Overall, I would say it was a very positive experiment. The module itself worked quite well, and for some of us who had the “robot chase” experience mentioned above, there was a kind of magical feeling to seeing the robot stop at the referee’s whistle.

We also identified areas where there is room for future improvement. The module itself does not have its own power source and is powered by the robot itself. We didn’t think this would be a problem, but “real world” testing has shown that the voltage levels a robot can provide fluctuates significantly (for example, if the robot decides to accelerate aggressively). A significant drop in voltage causes the module to disconnect. But it was a good lesson for everyone involved, and one we can definitely learn from when designing the next iteration.

RoboCupJunior Soccer 2023 Day 4 live stream. This stream includes the SuperTeam Finals and Skills Challenge. You can also watch the live stream of the semi-finals and finals from Day 3 here.

Can you tell us about the emergence of deep learning models in the RoboCupJunior league?

This is something we have started to observe in recent years, and to some extent it has surprised the organizers. In our day-to-day work (i.e. when we are not organizing RoboCups), many of us as organizers work in fields typically related to robotics, computer science, and engineering. Artificial intelligence and machine learning. And while we always thought it would be great to see more cutting-edge research applied in RoboCupJunior, we always dismissed it as too advanced or too difficult to set up for the high school students who make up the majority of RoboCupJunior. students.

Surprisingly, some advanced teams are starting to leverage methods and techniques that are very close to the current state-of-the-art in various fields, especially computer vision and deep learning. A good example is the object detector (usually based on the YOLO architecture) currently used in all three junior leagues. OnStage detects robots and humans performing together on stage, OnStage detects victims, Rescue allows robots to rescue, and soccer detects balls, goals, and opponents. Participants typically used off-the-shelf implementations, but were required to take all the steps necessary to successfully deploy this technology. This is by no means trivial and is very close to how these technologies are used in both research and industry.

At RoboCupJunior, we’ve only seen deep learning models used by more advanced teams, but we expect deep learning models to become much more prevalent in the future, especially as the technology and tools surrounding them become more mature and powerful. However, this shows that despite their age, RoboCupJunior students are very close to cutting-edge research and cutting-edge technology.

Action from RoboCupJunior Soccer 2023.

How can people get involved in RCJ (as a participant or organizer)?

That’s a very good question!

The best place to start is the RoboCupJunior website where you can find many interesting details about RoboCupJunior, each league (e.g. Football, Rescue and OnStage) and the relevant local representatives who organize local events. Contacting your local representative is the easiest way to get started with RoboCup Junior.

We also recommend the RoboCupJunior forums, where many past and present RoboCupJunior participants and hosts openly discuss many relevant topics. The community is very beginner friendly, so if RoboCupJunior sounds interesting to you, don’t hesitate to stop by and say hello!

About Marek Šuppa

Marek stumbled upon AI as a teenager while building a soccer-playing robot, and quickly realized he wasn’t smart enough to do all the programming on his own. Since then, he has been looking for ways to enable machines to learn on their own, especially through text and images. He currently serves as Chief Data Scientist at Slido (part of Cisco), improving the way meetings are conducted around the world. Staying true to his roots, he tries to give others the opportunity to have a similar experience by organizing the RoboCupJunior competition as part of the executive committee.