Hello,
With the tournament now only being little more than a month away, we want to give you an info about this year's tournament structure. Sadly till this day, we do not know the general schedule of the tournament, such that we are currently planning around a rough idea of where each event could be.
General Tournament Timeline
Team Setup Days: Tuesday 30. June - Wednesday 1. July Competition: Thursday 2. - Sunday 5. July Symposium: Monday 6. July
Tournament Style
With the additional Division B field this year, we increased the maximum number of teams to 24 with 10 planned in Div A and 14 in Div B. Alongside that, we also adapted the tournament structure in both divisions.
Due to the single field in Div A and the team registration still ongoing until June 2nd, we have currently still two different tournament options. Therefore, once the regular registration deadline has passed by, we will make an update to the [SSL grouping tool](https://github.com/RoboCup-SSL/ssl-grouping) on the day after and remove the teams which could not finish the team registration in time.
For the Div A tournament the group phase will consist of two groups with either 4 or 5 teams. In case that all 9 teams, which we currently expect, finish their team registration, the elimination phase will involve the best 6 teams as part of a double elimination system, whereas in case of only 8 teams, we will be able to include all teams in the double elimination style elimination stage.
For the Div B we are currently expecting 14 teams, leading to 4 groups, consisting of 3 or 4 teams. After the group phase we will have an intermediate stage, where we will determine the fifth to eighth best teams using a lucky looser round, where all of the second and third placed teams in each group will play against one team of another group. After that we will continue with 8 teams in a double elimination system.
To get a better understanding of the tournament structures feel free to already take a look at both prepared schedules: [Schedule with 9 teams in Div A](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OLfcAZqEqS484hQ-zAwiyAP-CBwQgKJ-ciER...) [Schedule with 8 teams in Div A](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10Bn-sD_hUCrTsEl8_GaS2gz2lRjEQ3i4WlZA...) Both schedules have the same structure for the Div B. Disclaimer: As the general RC schedule has not been confirmed yet, please see the times in the schedule only as a rough idea. Once the general events have been confirmed, we will send out an update.
As in the previous years the teams will be drawn into groups using the [SSL grouping tool](https://github.com/RoboCup-SSL/ssl-grouping). We have already updated the seeding pools for this year's competition (including all teams where the registration hasn’t been finalized yet) . The seeds are primarily determined by [last year's results](https://ssl.robocup.org/robocups/robocup-2025/robocup-2025-results/), as well as the participation in previous RC tournaments. As there are three German and Japanese teams in the Div A, we have decided to ignore the country of origin for Div A again this year
If you notice any issues with this seeding, please notify us before the 7th of July. This is important since we will draw groups on that day and we have a much harder time adjusting the seeding when the resulting groups are already available.
As we always do, we will use random.org for the random seeds required for the tool. We will draw the groups using the pre-generated random numbers for the 7th of July (which will become available at https://www.random.org/integers/?num=4&min=1&max=10000&col=5&... on that date) to seed our tool. (The first two numbers are used to seed Div A, and the last two to seed Div B)
Awards
The awards for this year can be found on the [homepage](https://ssl.robocup.org/robocups/robocup-2026/robocup-2026-awards/) from now on and are the same as last year. To be considered for the Open Source Award, you must submit your submission until June 16th, AoE, which is two weeks before the start of the tournament, to give all teams the option to review the submissions.
In line with last year all teams, who received at least one nomination for the Best (E)TDP Award during the review process and participated in the RC2026, will be eligible. For now this includes the following teams (in a random order):
- The Bots - UBC Thunderbots - RobôCIn - KIKS - GreenTea - Ri-one - Warthog Robotics - RoboJackets - TIGERs Mannheim - Traps - ER-Force - luhbots
Please take your time and read the (E)TDPs again, so that you can vote for your top three choices during the RoboCup.
In case of any questions, please feel free to reach out to any committee member.
Thank you,
David.
------------ RoboCup Small Size League | OC Member