RoboRugby Competition

The RoboRugby 2012 competition took place on Tuesday 17 April 2012.  Twenty one unique autonomous robots, designed by teams of first-year engineering students, played 40 short matches to determine the winner of RoboRugby 2012.  Thanks to generous sponsorship from Siemens, valuable cash prizes were awarded to the human members of the winning teams.

Results

For full details of all the matches and scores, scroll to the end of the page...

Matches

In a RoboRugby match, two robots compete against each other on a playing table with 15 balls.  The picture below shows the table layout used this year.  Each robot aims to score points by moving balls into the scoring areas at the ends of the table, while perhaps trying to prevent the opposing robot from scoring points.  Each match lasts for 60 seconds, and the position of the balls at the end of the match determines the score.  For more details, see the competition rules.

Ranking

The ranking round was held on Wednesday 4 April.  Each robot was tested without opposition to determine its seeding or ranking for the tournament.  This produced some impressive displays, with a best score of 24 points, and eight teams scoring 10 points or more.  Of course, the robots had no opposition in the ranking round - the actions of a competing robot in the table often produce very different results!

The ranking is in the table below.  The tie-break rules were used a few times to separate the lower teams.  Some teams managed to score points at the wrong end of the table, hence the negative scores!  The details are available here. 

Tournament

The competition takes the form of a double-elimination tournament.  Two robots compete in each match, and the winner proceeds to play the winner of another match as usual.  However, a robot that loses a match gets a second chance - it goes on to play against other robots in a similar position, and can eventually fight its way back to victory.  A robot is only eliminated from the tournament after losing two matches.  The tournament ends when only one robot remains, and that robot is the winner. 

The diagram below shows the results of all the matches in RoboRugby 2012 (printable version).