CFP: RoboCup2026 Soccer Simulation 2D League

13Dec 2025 by Hidehisa No Comments

Call for Participation RoboCup2026 Soccer Simulation 2D League

June 30 – July 6, 2026 – Incheon, Korea

Introduction

The RoboCup Soccer Simulation 2D League is one of the oldest RoboCup Soccer competitions. It is based on the RoboCup Soccer Simulator, which enables two teams of 11 simulated autonomous robots, plus an autonomous coach agent, to play a soccer game with very realistic rules and gameplay. Due to its stability, the RoboCup Soccer Simulator is an outstanding research and educational tool for multi-agent systems, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

We invite you to participate in the RoboCup 2025 Soccer Simulation League 2D competition, to be held from June 30 to July 6, 2026, in Incheon, Korea. If you are interested in participating, please submit your team’s qualification materials. Please see below in detail.

Important Dates

  • Qualification Deadline: March 8th, 23:59 UTC
  • Qualification Notification:  March 23rd, 23:59 UTC

Competitions Overview

The competitions of the soccer simulation 2D league in RoboCup 2026 consist of the following competitions:

Main Tournaments

The main tournaments determine the year’s world champions. They consist of seeding rounds, qualification rounds, and the final ladder tournaments. The main tournaments are held throughout the competition schedule. The details of the main tournaments are expected to be announced around April 2026.

Challenge

Challenge competitions are meant to develop a specific part of the soccer simulation 2D to achieve RoboCup’s ultimate aim (i.e., to win against the human world champion team by 2050). The details of the challenge competition are expected to be announced in April 2026. All qualified teams are eligible to participate. Teams that only want to join in the challenge are also welcome. Please contact the OC members if you wish to participate only in the challenge competition. See this document for detailed information on the challenge.

Summary of Participation Procedure

  • Submit qualification materials through this form (https://forms.gle/YS53EDKxGvDL68VQ7)
  • Qualification Submission Deadline: March 8th, 23:59 UTC 
    • Use the online form to submit team information and qualification materials
    • Qualification materials include
      • Team description paper (TDP)
      • Log files
  • Qualification Notification: March 23rd, 23:59 UTC

Team Description Paper (TDP)

The TDP must be 2 to 8 pages (plus any references; References do not count in page numbers) and submitted in Springer LNCS style as a PDF (to be named ‘TDP_TeamName.pdf’).

Please note: A team can only be qualified if its TDP is of appropriate quality! The quality of your TDP is significant.

The TDP should comprise, among other things:

  • The scientific focus of the team
  • The team’s current efforts
  • Progress since the last TDP if the team participated in the previous competitions
  • The team’s base code and a description of how the team is different from the base code
  • Originality of the team’s approach
  • Results (team results or, ideally, results achieved using the team’s main scientific contribution(s))
  • Related work (at least five and ideally more than ten references comparing the work with related work developed by other teams)

Please be aware that the TDP must describe the team’s scientific efforts and explicitly illustrate whether a team has used external knowledge (ideas, code, agent base, or the like) to build upon. If a team uses knowledge that has not evolved by the team itself, any achievements must be outlined in contrast to this. This also applies if one or more team members have switched from another team or a new team is created on another team’s base, even though the involved persons have stayed the same. If external knowledge is used but not referenced, explained, and differentiated in the TDP, the team and its members will be penalized and banned from this and next year’s RoboCup.

Log Files

To assess their performance and evaluate their scientific efforts in the context of gameplay, teams must submit two log files against two different teams from the top four of RoboCup2025 (HELIOS2025, YuShan2025, FRA-UNIted, RobôCIn).

The team binaries are available here.

Please use the most recent version of the Soccer Server to include both rcg and rcl files in version 5 (server::game_log_version = 5). These log files must prove that the team is competitive enough to participate and demonstrate its characteristics.

The log files must be archived into a single file (‘LogFiles_TeamName.tar.gz’) and submitted via the submission form. 

Qualification Rules

Qualification is based on the quality of the TDP and the team’s current performance, as reflected in submitted log files. The TDPs will be peer-reviewed by experts in the 2D RoboCup Simulation League nominated by the organizing committee. The reviewers will evaluate the qualification materials. The teams are qualified based on the reviewers’ evaluations. The review results can also be used for other purposes during the competition. For example, suppose there are more qualified teams than expected. In that case, teams with low evaluation scores will participate in the first round, and the other teams will proceed to the second round without the first.

Restriction Rules

Participants/teams must follow several restrictions. 

One-Team-Per-One-Person Rule:

Each participant can belong to only ONE team. Do not submit qualification materials from several teams. If you submit qualification materials from several teams, OCs will assign you to a randomly selected team.

Plagiarism-Penalty Rule:

If a team commits plagiarism, the team and its members will be banned from this year’s and next year’s RoboCup competitions. The term plagiarism comprises any use of external knowledge without proper referencing, i.e., copying or using the thoughts, ideas, texts, or language in general, and presenting them as one’s own. This applies to TDPs, log files, team source codes, and binaries. All kinds of licenses and copyrights must be respected. This applies to both the qualification process and the RoboCup tournaments. If suspicious behavior is found, committee members have the right to inspect the teams’ resources, including binaries and source codes. Please be aware that when a team is found guilty of plagiarism, it is disqualified and banned at any time. This may also be in the middle of the tournament.

No-Show Penalty Rule:

If a team qualifies for RoboCup2026 but cannot participate, it must cancel its participation before the early registration deadline for the TEAM to allow the next-ranked team to take its place. If a team fails to observe this rule (‘no-show’), it and its members will be banned from the RoboCup2027 competition.

Academic-Fairness-Rule:

If any team breaches general academic fairness in any other way, it will also face penalties.

Automatic-Qualification-Rules:

The top four teams from the last RoboCup (HELIOS2025, YuShan2025, FRA-UNIted, RobôCIn) are automatically qualified (after appropriately submitting the qualification materials). The remaining teams will be selected through the qualification process. If the top four teams at the last RoboCup significantly changed their team names or prominent team members, the organizing committee has the right to ask the teams for the reasons for these changes.

Additional Notices

Any notices of change or requests for additional information will be sent to the team email submitted when submitting the qualification materials.

Resources

Contacts

If you have any questions or need more information, please send a message to https://forms.gle/1SYjbJSsVVZS8WXy7 or use the q_and_a forum on our Discord server at https://t.ly/cY4K1.

RoboCup2026 Soccer Simulation 2D League:

  • Organizing Committee: Tomoharu Nakashima, Gabriel Lopes de Souza
  • Technical Committee: Omid Amini, Sebastian Marian
  • Executive Committee: Hidehisa Akiyama, Nadar Zare

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