Preparations for the RoboCupRescue Rapidly Manufactured Robot Challenge (RMRC) 2026!

[Raymond Sheh]

Hi All!


Happy New Year!

We are delighted to announce the start of preparations for the 2026
RoboCupRescue Rapidly Manufactured Robot Challenge (RMRC) World
Championships, to be held in Incheon, South Korea, from the 30th of June
to the 6th of July, 2026!


First, the important dates:

28th of Feb 2026: Team Participation Form (TPF) due (link to come). This
is a non-binding expression of interest in competing in the competition
and helps us to make sure we have enough resources available for all of
the teams we will be expecting. If you are considering participating,
please fill this in. If you don't fill this in and later want to join us
via open qualification, you might still be able to although we will be
prioritizing space for the teams who filled this in (and teams who might
not have filled this in but qualified via other avenues, such as
regional opens).

29th of March 2026: Qualification Team Description Materials (TDM) due
(details to come). This is a description of your team and robot, and
used to decide on open qualification (teams who qualify for the
international competition without going through a regional open). The
requirements will be similar to past years, stay tuned for details.

19th of April 2026: Notification of Qualification by TDM. Note that we
may qualify additional teams after this date via regional opens and
events, as well as from the local region and for regional diversity
(relevant teams will be contacted separately by their regional committees).

Date TBD: Normal registration deadline. Keep an eye on this mailing list
(and, if you like, the RoboCup Worldwide mailing list) for details!

16th of June 2026 (2 weeks before RoboCup): Updated TDMs due (details to
come). This TDM is supposed to reflect what you will be bringing to the
competition and will be scored based on how well it helps another team
learn how you did something interesting (be it your whole entry or a
deep dive into a very interesting part of it). This includes
presentation and open sourcing of resources. Again this will be similar
in intent and form to past years, stay tuned for details.


Those of you who have been following the RMRC journey for a while will
also have noticed that I have been (slowly!) handing over more  RMRC
duties to the rest of our wonderful RMRC Committee and this year will be
a continuation of that, with a focus on having other committee members
picking up the leads on rule development and logistics. As a result, you
will be seeing an increasing number of emails and other communications
from other committee members before and during the competition.

Part of this is also in further refining the rules and procedures. We
had a big update last year to bring these up to date and incorporate
some of the ad-hoc changes that have been made in past years. This year
we need all of you to help our fellow committee members to further
refine these and make sure that everyone is on the same page by
continuing to engage in comments on the document and the mailing list.

While I am stepping back, I am still around of course and happy to
answer questions and dive in, particularly in terms of connection to the
application, broader standard test methods, and, as we update the rules,
some of the historical context and experiences that shaped them and how
we might avoiding previously identified issues while we further improve
them.


Looking forward to a terrific RMRC 2026!


Cheers!


- Raymond

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https://raymondsheh.org