Unibotics Robot Programming Challenge

Introduction

Online asynchronous competition
Python language
Robot programming from your web browser
Free, just for fun
Based on ROS, on Gazebo simulator and Unibotics web platform

The Unibotics Robot Programming Challenge aims at engineering students, grad, master and PhD students all over the world and its goal is to foster robotics providing nice challenges and an opportunity to show your solutions to the robotics community and receive feedback from them. The participants will develop their solutions in the Unibotics robot programming website, in Python language.

The April 2026 challenge: a Formula1 car should follow a red line using visual control

The proposed challenge for this April 2026 edition is the FollowLine exercise of RoboticsAcademy. The participants have to program a Formula1 car to follow the red line drawn in the floor along several race circuits. The car is endowed with a front camera, a steering wheel (W) and an accelerator pedal (V). More information about the robot’s API in the RoboticsAcadamy webpage for that exercise. You can use both the available SimpleAPI or directly the ROS topics for camera images and robot control.

There are two types of Formula1 cars in this exercise: holonomic ones and Ackermann ones. You can use the holonomic car at the initial stages of the preparation of your solution, as their dynamics is stable and smooth. In your final solution, the Ackermann car should be used. In addition, there are several circuits available. You can use SimpleCircuit, Nurburgring, etc… for training and debugging. In your final solution the Montmeló circuit should be used, but it also should work in all other circuits with Ackermann car, as your solution should be general.

Your car should complete a whole lap the faster the better, and always more or less over the red line. If your car oscillates significantly it is not a good enough solution. If your car mostly goes over the line it’s ok, but it significantly departs from it then it is not a good solution. Take a look at the automatic score.


Organization and evaluation

  1. Asynchronous, from April 15th to April 30th.

  2. Each participant is required to register individually in the Unibotics and develop her/his solution there in Python language. Take a look at the Unibotics User Guide, you should download the RoboticsBackend docker image and launch it locally, maybe taking into account your local GPU.

  3. Each participant will submit two videos at Unibotics forum. One showing her/his solution running (it may include subtitles) and another video (two minutes maximum) explaining that solution to the robotics community in technical terms.

  4. This competition is for fun, there will be no prize at all. Nevertheless the organizing committee will publish a leaderboard at the end, and will provide hints and feedback to the participants so they can improve their solutions along the two weeks of the competition. In addition, feel free to provide your feedback to other participants about their solutions through the Unibotics forum. The underlying goal is to have a fruitful public discussion about the robotics solution to this visual control challenge and to have fun learning more robotics things.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who can participate?

Anybody, it’s an open competition. It is mainly aimed at university engineering students from all over the world (undergraduate, master, PhD) but it is open to anybody.

Does the competition infrastructure only work for Linux?

No, it has been tested and works on Linux, Microsoft-Windows and MacOS computers.

Support

For comments and doubts about the competition and the participation please go to the Unibotics forum.

May I improve my solution?

Yes. You probably will receive feedback and comments about your solution from other members of the robotics community. As long as you submit another pair of videos (that with your code running and that with your technical explanations) inside the competition time window, it is fine.