Robotics Society of Southern California Contest Rules

Get Your Robots Ready!

This is a listing of robot contests held by the Robotics Society of Southern California throughout the year.

Robot contests are announced during our meetings every 2nd Saturday of the month. Contests are scheduled to allow enough time for members to build and test their robots in anticipation of the BIG DAY of the contest.


RoboMagellan		This is a very challenging contest. Depending on the capabilities of the competing robots, various rules can be omitted upon request of the competitors. The most basic "Mini Robomagellan" will be: An orange traffic cone will be placed on a grassy area. Its GPS coordinates are recorded and given to the competitors before the contest. The competing robots all start from the same place. The winning robot will be the one finding the cone in the shortest amount of time.
Hallway Contest		The hall contest is designed to lead to a successful demonstration of home navigation for a mobile robot. To this end, the contest is geared around activities that would be expected of a robot within a home environment. The contest de-emphasizes speed as a goal and emphasizes sensors, navigation and intelligence.
Get Me a Beer Challenge		Move to fridge and from fridge to beer-requesting person, avoiding fixed and moving obstacles. Assume the robot has a map of the house and knows where the fridge is. However, he does not know in advance where the person requesting the beer. The robot also needs to be able to detect obstacles that are not in his map (e.g. other house guests, pets, furniture, ...). It would be really cool if the robot can still find the beer-requester that has moved position while the robot was out fetching the beer.
Line Maze Solving		This is an intermediate level contest that can be done by basic line-following robots (typical Pololu 3pi type robots). If your robot can follow a line, then you have the hardware necessary for this contest. From then on, it is just software. In the links below, you will find more on how to implement this. This contest is a good preparation for a MicroMouse contest that uses an actual walled labyrinth. In order to upgrade your robot to do a Micromouse contest, you need to add some wall following sensors (like IR range finders). The high-level maze solving algorithms should be basically the same.
Grid Navigation		These are the contest rules and previous contests photos for the Grid Navigation Contest to be held at RSSC meetings.
Wall Outlet Contest		The robot's objective is to demonstrate that - at some time in the remote future - a robot might pick up an electrical power cord from the floor, and plug it into a standard wall electrical power outlet.
Talent Contest		Everyone in the audience gives 4 scores, each between 1 and 10: - a score for the project merits on electronics - a score for the project merits on mechanics - a score for the project merits on software - a score for the project merits on project originality
Robot Sumo		Robo Sumo is an extremely exciting robot competition, where two robots placed in a ring must find each other and push the other out. Simple rules, not so simple to implement.In its simplest form, a robot must detect an object in proximity and go push against that object. Detection is typically done with IR range finders or ultrasonic sensors. But that is no requirement. If you can built a robot that can detect its opponent using vision or laser, kudos to you. In the mean while, the robot has to constantly check that it does not go over the competition area boundary itself. That's all.
Pick-Up-The-Can		Pick up a can autonomously using 1. Remote Control 2. Autonomous-Dead Reckoning 3. Autonomous-Sensors
Line Following		The following rules are based on the line following rules from the Robogames website: The objective of this contest is to complete the course in the shortest period of time while accurately tracking the course line from start to finish.