Hi teams,
this year’s RoboCup will be played with an entirely new set of rules. We’ve got some very valuable feedback from you that we incorporate to make the RoboCup games as enjoyable as possible for everyone. We’re aware that there’s only 3 weeks left until the RoboCup begins, so we try to keep the impact on strategies to a minimum.
The most significant change is about the pushing rule. There were two offenses that count as pushing:
1. pushing a defender inside its own defense area
2. pushing any robot for more than 0.2 meters
While the AutoRefs are capable of detecting the first one reliably, there have been a lot of false positives regarding the second offense. Additionally, 0.2 meters are quite a lot and some unsporting actions such as pushing a pass receiver away to spoil an otherwise successful pass would not even count as a foul. Therefore, we decided that for this year, the human referee will be in charge of calling pushing fouls again. The new version of the rule requires exertion of force (which may result in wheels slipping for example), and the 0.2 meter threshold is removed.
The first form of pushing (inside the defense area) will be merged with touching the keeper to the newly created foul “Attacker Touches Robot In Opponent Defense Area”. This means that touching the keeper is now also a foul instead of a minor offense, like all offenses that don’t require ball possession. The advantage rule applies here.
It was hard to find the Ball Placement and the Shoot-Out sections in the rules when printed on paper, because they were hidden in the “Special Command” section and did not appear in the table of contents. Therefore, the Ball Placement section is now one level higher and the Shoot-Out section is now a separate chapter.
Some more corrections:
– Communication between robot handlers and the game coordinator for robot substitution intents is allowed (the rules have been contradictory before)
– Ball Placement: the conditions for the ball position in which the human ref has to place the ball have been phrased more clearly
– Shoot-Out: the 10 second timer starts when the Normal Start command is issued, not the Shoot-Out command (this has been a mistake)
– Shoot-Out: since chip kick goals are permitted there, the definition of entering the goal during in Shoot-Out stage has been defined more precisely. It now reads: “[A goal is valid if] the ball touches the inner surface of a goal wall or the ground of the goal of the defending team”
Clarifications (without changes to the rules):
– Ball Placement Interference also applies to division B