As soon as possible! We would recommend starting when you get back to university and not leaving it all to the last minute - we will not have facilities at the event for you to do anything more than minor emergency repairs.

Regionals

The top three robots will be awarded certificates after the league competition!

Finals

The top three robots will be awarded prizes after the knockout competition!

We have also introduced two new awards for this season:

• Creativity and Technical Award: [SPONSORED PRIZE] Awarded to the robot that showcases the best creativity and complexity in the technology used or the design of the robot. Our Sponsors will be awarding this prize at the end of the Competition Day.
• Blogging Award: Awarded to a team that has shared their journey, their progress on social media or personal blog. We want to see you share about your experience participating in Unibots UK Competition and want to reward you for doing so! UO will award this prize at the end of the Competition Day.

No, however if you need further evidence to ask your university for funding to help you take part, just drop us an email (unibots.uk.comp@gmail.com) and we can provide what you need.

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

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

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 Edinburgh regional has now finished! Please see below for other details.

The sign-up for the Cambridge regional is now open, sign up here!

No, we welcome multiple teams from the same university (but please sign up separately). If you are part of a student society and are unsure of who will be on the teams, please register the rough number of students you think will take part, and email us to confirm later on. You definitely don't have to be part of a society though - we welcome teams of friends/coursemates/enemies/insert relationship here!

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

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!

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.

All robots that are colliding are reset as previous years, however, this year, if the balls are contained within or physically attached the robot (such that when the robot is picked up, the balls come with it) the balls will be kept within the robot (see rule 1.11.2).
The process for a reset happens like so:

• Two (or more) robots collide
• If the robots are in contact for 3 seconds (assessed by the referees), the scoring system plays a buzzer noise
• A 10 second reset timer begins
• The robots are picked up by the field resetters, and handed back to the teams
• The teams wait until the 10 second reset timer is complete, the scoring system will play another buzzer, then can place their robot back into the arena in their starting zone (the team can press their physical start button again as per rule 1.11.3)

At the regionals, if the robots are slightly (20-30mm) over the limit we will allow them to compete. During the finals, inspections will be conducted with a sizing tool made exactly to 200x200x200mm and 300x300x300mm (for extensions), and if the robot is larger than these tools it won't be allowed to compete for the prizes. This is to make it more fair for teams as in previous years we have been a bit lax on this rule and that has lead to some teams feeling unfairly treated.