Rescue Line Concerns

[jp.dip]

I have been working with teams for the past 6 years on the assumption that rescue line was more for beginners who were learning the basics and wanted to explore the world of robotics.

Rescue Line continues to get rule changes to make it more difficult. Why? What are beginners supposed to do? How much harder is rescue line going to be in the coming years?

It seems like RCJ does not want beginners anymore… maybe we should find another competition

2015 internationals:

2021 internationals (difficult, but very reasonable):

2023 internationals: (yes, that is a seesaw on top of the ramp… ). Not to mention, this is only half the field!!!

What is the vision for newcomers to robotics? What is RCJ trying to promote in regard to learning?

Rescue line is getting harder and harder. What are the new students supposed to do?

Increasing the difficulty like this each year doesn’t seem feasible for anyone. It’s ridiculous.

At the very least tell us if you want beginners to continue with RCJ. Otherwise, I will need to find a different competition for my new students.

Also, the earlier post about the rule changes regarding AI and removing the engineering journal is only going to make this issue worse. PLEASE reconsider all those ideas…

[david]

Firstly I should say that It’s been a long time since I’ve been in Rescue (back when I was competing and some refereeing but I’m on the Soccer committee, not the Rescue one).

As far as I can tell when you have simple courses for high level competitions (like international or SuperRegional ones) you end up having a race where seconds decide who gets what place. So you need the ability to make it hard enough that not everyone gets all the points.

We see a bunch of teams at our local tournaments that don’t deal with most of the complexity of the rules and still learn a lot, have a good time and do reasonably well - the ones that qualify for German Open then have to be able to deal with more difficult stuff if they want to do well there. Those who qualify for SuperRegional/international competitions then compete against the best teams in the world then have to deal with the hardest courses they can come up with. That seems fair enough to me.

With regards to the documentation requirements I can just say that it is really hard because many teams only read the documentation requirements for the international competition after their robots are already built and they have already qualified from their Region. It has been the exception for us in Soccer that teams submitted engineering journals that were actually created while doing the engineering and we have moved the requirements and judging rubrics a lot to find something we’re happy with.
I haven’t seen the new requirements for Rescue though and so can’t speak to them but please understand that because the international committee doesn’t control the regional competitions it is an impossible task for them to come up with something that works for everyone without the regions and the international competition adapting to each other.

[Dieguinilombrin]

Hello @jp.dip,

Thank you for sharing your concerns with us regarding the RCJ Rescue Line difficulty increase. In the RCJ Rescue Committee we are aware of the wide difference in development level across the globe, that apply the RCJ Rule Set for their local, regional and super regional competitions. When we make rule changes we are looking to accommodate new competitors while attempting to maintain the competition exciting, present new challenge that incentivize robot change while maintaining a similar budget. As you expect, this is a complicated and excited problem to have, how to incentivize more people to join the robotics world participating in a tournament while encouraging existing teams to keep participating over the years to keep improving and learning.

From that perspective, as you can see in the 2025 rule changes, we are keeping the rules flexible to allow to the field designers to adjust to the level of their competition. In Rescue Line in particular, this year we only made changes to simplify the competition, limiting the size of speed bumps, preventing difficult ramp configurations and scoring ramps in a more granular way to increase the scoring. In Rescue Maze for example, we reduced the difficulty of the overall challenge by removing the debris and reducing the size of the speed bumps back to 1cm and creating a new section called the dangerous zone, where teams could use this information in their advantage to decide to enter and take higher risks while also being able to have more scoring elements. Therefore, as you can see, we are making rule changes thinking how to make it more accesible for more people.

About the field designs themselves, I want to echo what David properly articulated in his response. For the different tournament organizers, call it local, regional, super regional or international competition, it is important to keep into consideration the different team level in order to design great fields. If a field is overcomplicated and most teams can’t perform properly, the score will be close to 0 having a not that great experience for competitors and making it hard to determine which are the best teams in the tournament to move them to the next stage. The same is the other way around, if the field is too simple, most teams will be scoring most of the elements, making it a not so challenging learning experience and making it hard to properly determine which is the best team. As field designers, we need to take all these things into consideration and look to balance it, so everyone can have fun, learn from the task in hand and look to overcome the challenge at the best of their capacity.

Hope this helps better understand the competition a little bit more, and if you still have concerns or ideas in how to improve this, we are more than happy to review them and take them into consideration for the upcoming competition!

Best,

Diego Garza Rodriguez
2025 Committee