Official Rules

The full official competition rules for 2025-2026 are available here.

Challenge Overview

Objective

The primary objective is to advance the development of artificial intelligence for multi-robot or multi-drone systems, a critical subject for both defense and civil security applications.

The Rescue Scenario

The core mission involves:

  • Exploring an unknown, difficult-to-access, and potentially dangerous area
  • Searching for people (stationary or wandering)
  • Guiding them out to a designated Rescue Area

A typical use case: investigating the dark or smoky basement of a collapsed building.

Drone Fleet & Equipment

Each team manages a fleet of 10 drones. Each drone is equipped with:

  • Communication functions
  • Laser rangefinder (lidar)
  • Semantic sensor (for object nature determination)
  • GPS

Drones have life points that diminish with collisions, leading to destruction when they reach zero.

Technical Focus

Teams must design solutions robust enough to:

  • Handle limited communication range
  • Collaborate to share information
  • Manage unforeseen events (sensor/communication failures, drone loss)

Any scientific approaches are welcomed: planning, learning, bio-inspiration, etc.

Simulation & Evaluation

All development takes place in a 2D simulation environment with maps of increasing complexity. Features include:

  • Physics engine
  • Simulated sensors and communications
  • Special zones: GPS denied, communications denied, drone destruction

Drone controllers must be developed in Python. The simulation environment is open source.

Evaluations

  • Intermediate Evaluation 1: Navigation functions
  • Intermediate Evaluation 2: Coordination and communication functions
  • Final Evaluation: Conducted on unknown maps, testing all difficulties in a complete scenario

Scoring Criteria

Weighted evaluation focuses on:

  • Percentage of people rescued
  • Percentage of map explored
  • Drone life points remaining
  • Percentage of time remaining

The top 10 teams after technical evaluation must present their solution to a jury. Quality and operational credibility of the solution are considered in the final score.

The organizers do not claim any intellectual property rights over the solutions.