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Call for Participation
RoboCup 2026 Soccer Simulation 3D League
June 30 – July 6, 2026 Incheon (South Korea)
https://2026.robocup.org/
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The RoboCup Soccer Simulation 3D Competition provides a great opportunity for research with humanoid robots without the need for investing in robot hardware. It facilitates experimenting with different learning and optimization techniques by providing a simulated environment. The league is also a perfect environment for research on multi-robot coordination methodologies.
The league will use a new, more realistic, simulator in 2026, featuring (at least) a simulated Booster T1 robot. We invite real robot teams to test it and to participate in the Soccer Simulation 3D League 2026 competition.
We would like to invite you to participate in the RoboCup 2026 Soccer Simulation League 3D competition in Incheon, South Korea. If you are interested in participating, please register your team and follow the procedure as outlined below.
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Important Dates
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January 15, 2026 (23:59 AoE): Team Qualification Materials Submission Deadline
January 30, 2026: Qualified Teams Announcement
June 30 – July 6, 2026: Competition
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League Evolution
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In alignment with the ongoing evolution of the RoboCup Soccer leagues, the 3D Simulation League will transition to a new simulator in 2026. This change aims to enhance the realism of our simulations significantly.
The league will adopt the MuJoCo simulator (available here: https://gitlab.com/robocup-sim/rcssservermj).
Detailed rules regarding this transition will be announced shortly by the Technical Committee (TC). We strongly recommend that all interested parties join the league’s Discord community to follow the latest discussions and rule announcements: https://discord.gg/FSyhC3e3
Having a new simulator is also a unique chance for new teams to step in the competition.
Games will be played by using a Booster T1 simulated robot model. Additional models are being tested and may be announced by the TC before the end of March 2026.
Zero-shot behavior deployment from IsaacSim to the new Sim3D simulator and to a real T1 robot has been demonstrated.
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Waiver of the team fee for NEW Teams
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The RoboCup Federation is pleased to continue with a waiver of the team fee for the RoboCup competition for NEW teams in the major leagues.
A NEW team is defined as a team with a new name and all of whose team members have never participated in an annual international RoboCup competition. The waiver applies only to the team fee and does not waive fees for team members.
In addition, the 3D soccer simulation league will issue a certificate to the best NEW team in the 3D competition.
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Qualification
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Qualification is based on a team’s current performance, previous achievements in RoboCup, scientific contributions in relevant areas in past years, cooperation in the Discord channels, and simulator development. Also, up to six slots will be prioritized for new teams. In RoboCup 2026, up to 24 teams will participate in the 3D Soccer Simulation Competition. The top three teams from RoboCup 2026 (FC Portugal, magmaOffenburg, and Dionysius) are automatically qualified upon submission of an appropriate Team Description Paper (TDP).
The other 21 teams will be selected through a qualification process.
Qualification material consists of:
1. Team Description Paper (TDP)
The TDP should describe your research focus and ideas implemented in the team.
It should clearly describe your own work and your contributions in addition to explicitly specifying what you have used from others’ efforts (including, but not limited to, any source code released by other teams or their scientific work). In qualification, teams must be judged based on their own work, so failing to acknowledge the work of others could result in immediate disqualification. The length of the TDP must be at least four (4) pages and should not exceed twelve (12) pages in Springer LNCS Style. Please do not include TDPs that you submitted to RoboCup in previous years.
Please submit the TDP only as a PDF document, with the name of your team in the filename, i.e. Teamname_TDP.pdf .
2. A List of Publications and Achievements on previous RoboCup Symposia and in other relevant international journals and conferences. Please also include your team’s achievements in RoboCup and related events of previous years. If you are new to the RoboCup 3D community, you may also include references to relevant research done by your team that shows its potential. Please submit the contribution list as a PDF document, with the name of your team in the filename, i.e. Teamname_list.pdf .
3. Binary
All teams should submit a working binary of their team. For this year teams can choose to send either a binary compatible with the old Simspark simulator or a binary compatible with the new MuJoCo Simulator. All qualified teams must have a working binary for the MuJoCo Simulator during the competition. No Simspark competitions will take place in RoboCup 2026.
Submitted binaries should adhere to the following:
– Two scripts should be included: a startup script, called start.sh, to run a full team of agents, and a kill script, called kill.sh, to fully kill all agents of the team. The requirements and examples of these scripts can be found on the rules page.
– All necessary external libraries should be included and be used locally by the binary. The OC will not make an effort to install extra libraries on the qualification systems. A Java runtime and a Python 3.x environment can be assumed to be available.
– The binaries should not create any output, be it through standard output or to files and no graphical (debugging) interface should be used.
– The binary should be compiled for 64 bit systems and should work on a modern GNU/Linux distribution, such as Ubuntu 24.04. You may also send 32-bit binaries, but it is your responsibility to make sure that it runs correctly on 64-bit distributions. You can assume that basic 32-bit libraries (e.g. libc) are installed on the 64 bit OS. To summarize: the binary should run out of the box on a standard, clean, headless system in a restricted sandbox environment with the simulation server (possibly) running on a different machine. The OC will not try to fix errors. When a binary fails to run, the respective team will be notified and will have to resubmit their material before the deadline.
Please put all qualification material in a folder with your team name, create a tarball named teamname.Simspark.tar.gz or teamname.Mujoco.tar.gz, and upload it to the registration form.
https://forms.gle/GeTvkxiSQ9hhw3Cg6
You should upload only one file that includes all your qualification materials.
If everything works fine, you will receive a confirmation. If you did not receive any confirmation within two (2) days, don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Organizing Committee.
If you encounter any problem sending your qualification materials, please don’t hesitate to contact the OC.
Teams will be qualified based on the submitted materials as described in this CfP. The following general qualification limitations will also be considered:
– One-Third-Rule: The so-called One-Third-Rule rule states that only up to 1/3 of the participants in a competition may be from the same country.
– One-Team-Per-Institute-Rule: The One-Team-Per-Institute-Rule states that only one team from each university or research institute is allowed to participate in a competition. Note that it is okay for different teams from the same institute to participate in different competitions, e.g. 2D and 3D soccer.
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3D Soccer Simulation League Resources
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https://ssim.robocup.org/3d-simulation/3d-tools/
Resources with more information on the 3D Simulation League and how to enter as a new team using existing base codes. You can find the BahiaRT’s MuJoCo base code release, used by most teams during the RoboCup Brazil Open 2025, at this link.
Best Regards,
RoboCup 2026 3D Soccer Simulation Organizing Committee
In case of doubts email: ssim3d-rc26-oc@googlegroups.com
Do not send qualification materials by email