The use of robots as educational tools provides a stimulating environment for students. Some robotics competitions focus on primary and secondary school aged children, and serve as motivation for students to get involved in educational robotics activities. Although very appealing, many students cannot participate on robotics competitions because they cannot afford robotics kits. Hence, several students have no access to educational robotics, especially on developing countries. To minimize this problem and contribute to education equality, we have created RoSoS Robot Soccer Simulator, in which students program virtual robots in a similar way that they would program their real ones. In this chapter we explain some technical details of RoSoS and discuss the implementation of a new league for the robotics competitions: Junior Soccer Simulation league (JSS). Because soccer is the most popular sport in the world, we believe JSS will be a strong motivator for students to get involved with robotics.
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For almost 25 years, the goal of the RoboCup has been to build soccer robots capable of winning against the FIFA World Champion of 2050. To foster the participation of the next generation of roboticists, the RoboCupJunior competition takes place in parallel and provides a similar challenge of appropriate difficulty for high school students. RoboCupJunior has three main categories: Soccer, Rescue and OnStage. For the Soccer category, participants need to design, build and program a team of autonomous robots to play soccer against an opponent team of robots. The competition is physical in nature, since it assumes physical robots playing against one another. In 2020 and 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic has made it difficult for a competition of this type to take place, due to obvious restrictions on physical gatherings. To allow for some sort of participation, and inspired by positive experience of the larger RoboCup community, the Organizing Committee of RoboCupJunior Soccer has explored porting a portion of the challenge to a simulated environment. Many of the existing environments, however, are built for higher education/research teams competitions or research, making them complex to deploy and generally unsuitable for high school students. In this paper we present the development of SoccerSim, a simulated environment for RoboCupJunior Soccer, based on the Webots open-source robotics simulator. We also discuss how the participation of students was key for its development and present a summary of the competition rules. We further describe the case study of utilizing SoccerSim first as a testbed for a Demo competition, and later as part of RoboCup Worldwide 2021. The participation of more than 60 teams from over 20 countries suggests that SoccerSim provides an affordable alternative to physical robotics platforms, while being stable enough to support a diverse userbase. The experience of using SoccerSim at RoboCupJunior Worldwide 2021 suggests that a simulated environment significantly lowers the barrier to entry, as evidenced by the participation of many teams that have not participated before. To make it easy for similar competitions to take place in the future, we made the code of SoccerSim available as open-source, as well as the associated tooling required for using it in a tournament.
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The use of robots as educational tools provide a stimulating environment for students. Some robotics competitions focus on primary and secondary school aged children, and serve as a motivation factor for students to get involved in educational robotics activities. But, in most competitions students are required to deal with robot design, construction and programming. Although very appealing, many students cannot participate on robotics competitions because they cannot afford robotics kits and their school do not have the necessary equipment. Because of that, several students have no access to educational robotics, especially on developing countries. To minimize this problem and contribute to education equality, we present a proposal for a new league for the robotics competitions: The Junior Soccer Simulation league (JSS). In such a league, students program virtual robots in a similar way that they would program their real ones. Because there is no hardware involved, costs are very low and participants can concentrate on software development and robot's intelligence improvement. Finally, because soccer is the most popular sport in the world, we believe JSS will be a strong motivator for students to get involved with robotics. In this paper we present the simulator that was developed (ROSOS) and discuss some ideas for the adoption of a Junior Soccer Simulation competition.
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Aanleiding Nieuwsuitgeverijen bevinden zich in zwaar weer. Economische malaise en toegenomen concurrentie in het pluriforme medialandschap dwingen uitgeverijen om enerzijds kosten te besparen en tegelijkertijd te investeren in innovatie. De verdere automatisering van de nieuwsredactie vormt hierbij een uitdaging. Buiten de branche ontstaan technieken die uitgeverijen hierbij zouden kunnen gebruiken. Deze zijn nog niet 'vertaald' naar gebruiksvriendelijke systemen voor redactieprocessen. De deelnemers aan het project formuleren voor dit braakliggend terrein een praktijkgericht onderzoek. Doelstelling Dit onderzoek wil antwoord geven op de vraag: Hoe kunnen bewezen en nieuw te ontwikkelen technieken uit het domein van 'natural language processing' een bijdrage leveren aan de automatisering van een nieuwsredactie en het journalistieke product? 'Natural language processing' - het automatisch genereren van taal - is het onderwerp van het onderzoek. In het werkveld staat deze ontwikkeling bekend als 'automated journalism' of 'robotjournalistiek'. Het onderzoek richt zich enerzijds op ontwikkeling van algoritmes ('robots') en anderzijds op de impact van deze technologische ontwikkelingen op het nieuwsveld. De impact wordt onderzocht uit zowel het perspectief van de journalist als de nieuwsconsument. De projectdeelnemers ontwikkelen binnen dit onderzoek twee prototypes die samen het automated-journalismsysteem vormen. Dit systeem gaat tijdens en na het project gebruikt worden door onderzoekers, journalisten, docenten en studenten. Beoogde resultaten Het concrete resultaat van het project is een prototype van een geautomatiseerd redactiesysteem. Verder levert het project inzicht op in de verankering van dit soort systemen binnen een nieuwsredactie. Het onderzoek biedt een nieuw perspectief op de manier waarop de nieuwsconsument de ontwikkeling van 'automated journalism' in Nederland waardeert. Het projectteam deelt de onderzoekresultaten door middel van presentaties voor de uitgeverijbranche, presentaties op wetenschappelijke conferenties, publicaties in (vak)tijdschriften, reflectiebijeenkomsten met collega-opleidingen en een samenvattende white paper.
