I want to thank everyone who took the time to review the proposed changes that were previously shared in other forum posts, sharing their thoughts and proposing their ideas. Our goal as the RCJ Rescue Committee is to continue improving the leagues that we have, creating better learning opportunities for the competitors while looking for the next generation of innovations. Please review these draft rules and provide any feedback as soon as possible, as we will be releasing the final rules really soon.
Best,
Diego Garza Rodriguez on behalf of the 2025 RCJ Rescue Committee
Will teams still have only one attempt for the technical challenge, even though it now accounts for 20% of the total score?
If that is the case, I find this rule quite concerning. If anything goes wrong, such as a wire coming loose or the controller crashing (which might not even be the team’s fault), it could completely ruin their chances of achieving a good overall score. This seems very unfair.
Some might argue that the technical challenge is designed to reward the reliability of robots. However, the limited time available to prepare makes it nearly impossible to achieve perfect reliability. As a result, a single small mistake or simply bad luck could have a disproportionately large impact on a team’s final ranking.
I believe teams should be given at least two attempts for the challenge. This change would provide everyone with a fairer opportunity and significantly reduce the stress of having to perform perfectly on the first try. I speak from experience: watching our robot navigate the technical challenge parcours, knowing that a single false symbol or a loose bolt could cost us multiple places in the ranking (even when the challenge accounted for only 10% of the total score), was one of the most nerve-racking experiences of my life.
Thank you for expressing your concern regarding the technical challenge scoring changes. We haven’t closed on the details about running the technical challenge yet and the specifics for the international competition won’t be shared until we are onsite, like previous years. Rest assured that we understand the implications of increasing the percentage of this challenge and we are looking for ways to better accommodate this decision (being one of them the one you suggest to have more than one technical challenge round).
Once again, thank you for taking the time to communicate your concern, if you have more regarding this topic or any other, don’t hesitate to post it here!
The general guidelines are all the rules described in the section “1. RoboCupJunior International 2025 General Rules”, which you can find them in the section 1 of the rules document and there is also a copy in the official RoboCupJunior website: RoboCupJunior General Rules – RoboCupJunior
Hello. Thank you for submitting the 2025 draft rule.
I would like to hear committee’s views on some of the concerns I have raised in my previous comment (Oct 19, 2024). Question and confirmation
What decisions will be made, particularly with regard to scoring on ramps?
Thank you for raising your question and concern. The scenario you’re describing in your post has been discussed in the committee for a while and we haven’t been able to come up with a rule modification that can address your concern while not having side implications with other rules. I want to clarify that the edge case you’re describing is something that has been in the Rescue line rules for a while and not being introduced by the 2025 rule changes.
We are going to continue with the published draft rules 2025 version, unless we are able to come up with a proper solution. If you or anyone else has a rule change proposal, we are all ears.
Note: The edge case you describe doesn’t apply only to ramps, but to any two contiguous scoring elements positioned in different tiles, where the following scoring element delays the scoring of the previous element and, in case of a failure, miss to score the previous element while failing to do a challenge in the next tile.