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March 2026

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RoboCup Smart Manufacturing 2026: Call for Participation
by Asad Norouzi 10 Mar '26

10 Mar '26

Call for Applications for Participation RoboCup 2026 – Smart Manufacturing League https://2026.robocup.org Venue: Incheon, South Korea Tuesday, June 30th through Monday, July 6th, 2026 The Smart Manufacturing League (SML) is a league of the RoboCup competition, focusing on embodied autonomous robotic systems for next-generation industrial and manufacturing environments. The Smart Manufacturing League (SML) is formed through the merger of the RoboCup Logistics League and the RoboCup@Work League, combining their complementary strengths to create a unified league that addresses end-to-end smart manufacturing challenges. The league aims to foster research and development in autonomous mobile manipulation, flexible automation, and intelligent logistics within realistic industrial scenarios. The goal of SML is to advance innovative robotic solutions that integrate mobility, manipulation, perception, planning, and human–robot interaction for cutting-edge industrial applications. These applications span manufacturing processes, flexible assembly and disassembly, parts handling, intra-logistics, warehouse and factory logistics, and safe collaboration with human workers. The SML competition is characterized by an abstracted realistic smart manufacturing environment, designed to enable diverse robotic platforms and research approaches. This environment includes manipulation objects such as parts, containers, and tools; infrastructure elements such as shelves, workstations, bins, and platforms of varying sizes; machines, and production stations. The environment is designed to reflect modern, interconnected factory and logistics settings. Competition challenges are defined through a set of structured tests and scenarios that evaluate key capabilities including but not limited to autonomous navigation, object perception, manipulation, transportation, precision placement, planning, task sequencing, communication, and coordination within dynamic industrial workflows. A rulebook, benchmarks descriptions, and technical details of the Smart Manufacturing League will be published on the official SML GitHub organization. We invite all interested parties to have a look and discuss using issues. The first competition of the new SML aims for the following: - Welcomes all teams and robot platforms, including humanoid ones. - Allows participation with existing systems, including former RC@Work and RCLL robots - Gaps in capability of teams and robots may be filled by human interaction - Encourages incremental improvements toward higher autonomy (less human intervention is preferred) Participation in the Competition All teams that intend to participate in the competition have to perform the following steps: 1. Submission of qualification materials including a Team Description Paper and a video of their robots performance. Details are below. 2. Final registration (qualified teams only) Qualification The qualification process serves a dual purpose: It should allow the Technical Committee (aka TC) to assess the safety of the robots a team intends to bring to the competition, and it should allow ranking teams according to a set of evaluation criteria in order to select the most promising teams for a competition, if not all interested teams can be permitted. The TC will select the qualified teams according to the qualification materials provided by the teams. The evaluation criteria will include: - Team description paper - Relevant scientific contributions/publications - The professional quality of the robot and software - Novelty of approach - Relevance to industry - Performance in previous competitions - Contribution to the SML League or the former RC@Work or RCLL, e.g. by Organization of events and/or provision and sharing of knowledge - The quality of the robot's performance of a task (selected by the team) shown in a video, e.g. a previous competitions of RC@Work or RCLL. - Team website Team Description Paper The Team Description Paper (TDP) is a central element of the qualification process and has to be provided by each team as part of the qualification process. The TDP should at least contain the following information in the author/title section of the paper: - Name of the team (title) - Team members (authors), including the team leader - Link to the team website - Contact information The body of the TDP should contain information on the following: - the focus of research/research interests - a description of the hardware, including an image of the robot(s) - a description of the emergency stop concept and its implementation - a description of the software, esp. the functional and software architectures - innovative technology (if any) - reusability of the system or parts thereof - applicability and relevance to industrial tasks - usage of components (software or hardware) developed by other RoboCup teams The team description paper should cover the technical and scientific approach in detail, while the team website should be designed for a broader audience. Both the website and the TDP have to be in English. All TDPs must be written using the following template: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/springer-lecture-notes-in-computer… Submission and Evaluation All applications with the qualification material must be submitted by March 20th, 2026 through the following online form: https://forms.gle/1TsxcAB52gyToCWv9 Qualified teams will be tentatively announced by March 27th, 2026. Important Links of the Smart Manufacturing League (SML) Discord: https://discord.gg/RBTmHc3zMP GitHub: https://github.com/robocup-sml Mailing List: https://lists.robocup.org/mm/lists/robocup-sml.lists.robocup.org/ Regards, On behalf of the SML-Organizers

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