Generally the students should be doing a majority of the design and building work, but if you were to ask lecturers for their advice, or for them to check over designs, that would be well within the rules! So students doing the actual work, lecturers there to verify and scrutinise!

There is no maximum, the robot can hold as many as it wishes!

There is no maximum, however you may very quickly encounter a "too many cooks" situation when trying to design the robot!

No, all processing, be that action prediction, computer vision, etc. must be done within the bounds of the robot. For example, you cannot connect your robot's control system to a laptop arena side which is aiding the computer vision; or connect your robot control system to an online LLM which is aiding in action prediction.
Computer vision and action prediction can be performed, as long as all processing is done within the robot. This could be using a standard Raspberry Pi within the robot, a NVIDIA Jetson device, or other single board computer. Processing can also be performed on a mobile phone contained within the robot's body, and may be connected wirelessly. Again, this mobile device must not then connect to the internet for further processing.
During robot safety inspections, we will be asking questions for this, and during the finals teams will not be allowed to compete unless the judges are satisfied that the robot is doing all its own processing.

Yes, the "direct contact" wording was used to prevent ambiguity from previous years. If the ball is touching a part of the robot anywhere, it is scored, even if that is inside the robot if you have some collection mechanism. However, if your robot is for example in the shape of the letter "U", and the ball is within the U but not touching the actual robot, it would not be counted. In the case where there are two ball bearings, A and B, if ball bearing A attaches itself to a teams robot magnetically, then ball bearing B attaches itself to ball bearing A only, it would be counted by extension.

Yes you can attend both regionals! The only thing to keep in mind is that we don’t sponsor any travel costs.

There is no fee to attend events nor to register a team for this season!

Regionals are created for you to trial your robot and see the arena in person and your robot in action so ideally you want a somewhat working robot. But it does not need to be « finalised » until the finals day in July.

At the moment, there is no deadline for the general sign up as we have the finals quite late this season. But signing up now means you will get any new information -such as details & sign ups forms regarding regionals straight into your inbox/chat. You don’t need to have ALL the info now to sign up, it also helps us gauge the interest for any goodies coming up this year.

The sign-up for the Edinburgh regional is now available! It can be found here!

The sign-up for the Cambridge regional will be opened at the start of March!