FIRA SimulCup 2021 Call for Participation

FIRA SimulCup 2021

Introduction

FIRA 2021 will run as a hybrid event with some real robot competitions and some virtual ones. The main competition will be held in St. Luis, Brasil, and hence FIRA SimulCup 2021 will be a Brazilian themed event.
However, since many places in the world are under various COVID-related restrictions, it is still impossible for many of our participants to travel internationally. Therefore, FIRA 2021 is organized as a SimulCup, that is, real robot events will be organized and judged simultaneously in several local events happening world-wide.
We will also hold several 1hr workshops where students can build and program a variety of robot systems from home.

Important Dates

Hub Venues & Contact information

The main organizer is the FIRA Brasil Chapter, who will host the main event at Black Swan.
Main Venue: Black Swan, St. Luis, Brazil Contact organizer via email [email protected]
The FIRA SimulCup will host several larger local events around the world because of the difficulties of international travel at the moment.
Hub Venues:

• Canada: ([email protected])
• South Korea: Dynamixel Hall, ROBOTIS Co., Ltd, Seoul Korea ([email protected])
• Taiwan: National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology (NKUST), Kaohsiung, Taiwan ([email protected])

Competitions

The FIRA RoboWorld Cup 2021 SimulCup includes the following competitions:

FIRA Pro

• HuroCup (Chair: Meng Cheng Lau [email protected]) – Events: Sprint, Basketball, Weight-lifting, Archery, Triple Jump, and United relay Physical
• Autonomous Cars Race Simulation Competition(Chair: Soroush Sadeghnejad [email protected]) Virtual
• Business & Innovation – (Chair: Soroush Sadeghnejad [email protected]) Virtual
• Air Simulation Competition – Pro (Chair: Amirali Setayeshi [email protected]) Virtual
• Tele-OP Robot Arm U14/U19 (Chair: Kuo-Yang Tu [email protected]) Tele-Op (Participants operate real robot arm via internet)

FIRA Youth

• HuroCup-Jr U19 (Chair: Meng Cheng Lau [email protected]) Events: Sprint, Weight-lifting, Triple jump, and United relay Physical
• Autonomous Cars Race Simulation Competition U19 (Chair: Soroush Sadeghnejad [email protected]) Virtual
• Business & Innovation – (Chair: Soroush Sadeghnejad [email protected]) Virtual
• Air Simulation Competition – (Chair: Amirali Setayeshi [email protected]) Virtual
• Mission Impossible – U14/ U19 (Chair: Jacky Baltes [email protected]) Physical
• FIRA Youth Sports Robot Simulation (Chair: Hossein Mahdipour [email protected]) Virtual
• Tele-OP Robot Arm U14/U19 (Chair: Kuo-Yang Tu [email protected]) Tele-Op (Participants operate real robot arm via internet)

FIRA 2021 World Summit

The FIRA World Summit will be held in conjunction with FIRA Robot World SimulCup, from 1st to 7th of December 2021. The purposes of organizing FIRA RoboWorld Cup and Summit are to share many ideas and research results in AI and robotics areas. The FIRA Summit is soliciting novel research results on advanced robotics, intelligent systems, and building successful simulations for robots and systems.

Best Student Paper Award

FIRA Summit will award one best student paper award to the paper with a student as first author and that was presented by a student during the summit. The award will be judged by a jury whose members were selected from the FIRA community.
FIRA Summit will be an online conference hosted on the official FIRA Discord channel.

Submission

Papers submitted should be written in English and at least two pages in single-column formats. All papers will be peer-reviewed, and evaluated by members of the senior FIRA Summit program committee.

Papers should be formatted following the LNAI author guidelines (https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines) and must be electronically submitted through the EasyChair electronic submission system (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=firasummit2021).

Selected papers will be recommended to be submitted to the Special Issue of the Knowledge Engineering Review, indexed in Science Citation Index (SCI) of Web of Science.

Program Chairs and Co-Chair

• Prof. Soroush Sadeghnejad, [email protected], Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), Chair
• Prof. Ayşegül Uçar, [email protected] , Firat University, Co-Chair

Dr. Cheng Memorial Scholarship

The FIRA headquarter will award two scholarships ($500 travel support for FIRA 2022) for the one male and one female student participating in FIRA 2021. The scholarships are in memory of Dr. Chi Tai Cheng, a very active and influential member of the FIRA community who sadly passed away from cancer in 2015.

The applications for the scholarship must be submitted by the team leaders. Each team leader is allowed to nominate one male and one female student from their team for this award. The students must prepare a 2 – 3-page application showing their technical skills, awareness of social issues, leadership potential, and extracurricular activities. The report also must clearly indicate their name, team name and their previous involvement in robotics and the FIRA competitions. The deadline for submission is the end of the second day of every year’s FIRA Robot World Cup competition. The application should be submitted via email to <[email protected]>.

FIRA Band and Closing Ceremony

Unfortunately, the current COVID pandemic makes it impossible for many of us to meet our FIRA friends. And we all miss the great performances of our FIRA participants during previous FIRA band events.

To give you a chance to have some fun together and to blow off some steam, FIRA SimulCup 2021 will also organize a virtual FIRA farewell party and band event. If you want to showcase your or your team’s singing, dancing, comedy or other artistic talents, then send a video (max duration 3 min) to the FIRA Band Chair Meng Cheng Lau ([email protected]).

Schedule

All dates and times are in Brasilian time (GMT – 3h).
Opening Ceremony: 2nd December 2021, 8:00am Brazil Time
Closing Ceremony: 6th December 2021, 8:00am Brazil Time
Time zone reminders:

Registration

The fees for registration of teams (1 coach and 4 team members) and/or additional members are shown below.

Note that all team members with regular team registration will automatically be registered for the FIRA summit and no extra registration fee needs to be paid for presenting a paper at the FIRA Summit.

Participants can register via the following URL:

More information on

www.firaworldcup.org
https://www.facebook.com/groups/firarobot/

Contact

FIRA HQ Executive Secretary: Christine Kim [email protected]/ +82-10-5208-4354
FIRA World Summit Chair: Prof. Soroush Sadeghnejad [email protected]