● Open source

Take the rules. Run your own meet.

Every event we run is published free — rules, field plans, scoring sheets, prop CAD, the lot. You don’t need a licence, a franchise fee or our permission to hold a competition. Download it, run it, send us the results.

Get the event packsSee the 12 events

● Why give it away

Because a locked rulebook is how this got expensive.

School robotics got costly partly because the rules, the field and the parts all came from the same place, and every season brought a new field to buy.

We’d rather the rules belong to everybody. If a teacher in a state we’ve never visited wants to run a four-event meet next month with tape and a gym, nothing about our business model should stand in the way — and if they run it better than we do, we want to learn from them.

We sell robot kits. We don’t sell permission.

# events/sumo/
rules.pdf ← 4 pages, plain language
field-plan.pdf ← tape it out in 10 min
score-sheet.pdf ← print and clipboard
inspection.pdf ← what a ref checks
CHANGELOG.md ← v1.2 — every change, dated
props/ ← STL + DXF
LICENSE ← CC BY-SA 4.0

● The licence, in plain English

What you can and can’t do.

Event packs are released under Creative Commons Attribution–ShareAlike 4.0. The short version:

✓ Run meets, free or paidIncluding charging entry to cover your costs. It’s your event.
✓ Change the rulesAdapt an event for your space, your age group, your gym. Share the modified version and others benefit.
✓ Translate itInto any language. We publish in English and Spanish; the rest is up to whoever needs it.
✓ Teach from itUse it in class, in a curriculum, in a workshop, in a book.
× Claim it as your ownAttribution stays. Credit the league and any team named in the changelog.
× Close it back upShareAlike means your modified version stays open too. Nobody gets to fence off a fork.

The one thing we do keep: the name and the season standings. Anyone can run a Sumo meet using our pack — but calling it an official Robot Battle League meet, and having results count toward season rankings, means following the current rules version and submitting your scores. That’s the only string attached.

● Run a meet

Four steps, one Saturday.

  1. Pick your events

    Four to eight is a comfortable day. If it’s your first, take Sumo, Sprint, Precision Park and Line Dash — between them they need a gym, tape, and nothing else. Download those four packs.

  2. Find a room and a date

    A school gym, a library meeting room, a makerspace, a community centre. You need floor space, tables for pits, and power. Most host schools waive the rental because their own team competes.

  3. Get four volunteers

    One head referee, one scorekeeper, one inspector, one runner. The packs include a one-page brief for each role, so nobody needs prior experience. We’ll join your first one by video if that helps.

  4. Run it, then send the results

    Scores go in the score sheet, the sheet comes to us, and the placings enter the season standings. Tell us what went wrong too — that’s how the rules improve.

Insurance is the one thing you shouldn’t improvise. Any event with the public in the room needs liability cover, and if you’re running Combat it has to specifically include robot combat — most standard event policies exclude it. Ask us before you book a venue and we’ll tell you what we know.

● Propose an event

The library should outgrow us.

Twelve events is a starting library, not a finished one. The best new events will come from teams who got bored of the existing ones and invented something better.

Freestyle exists partly for this reason: it’s the event where students design their own challenge and demonstrate it. Several of those will deserve to become real events, and when one does, the proposing team’s name goes in the changelog and stays there.

We’re looking for events that use the same kit, need little or nothing to set up, can be judged by a human without special equipment, and teach something the existing twelve don’t.

What a proposal needs

  • 📝Rules in plain language. If a substitute teacher can’t referee it from the page, it’s not ready.
  • 📏A field plan that a school can build from tape, cardboard or a printer.
  • 🏅A scoring method a human can apply with a clipboard and a stopwatch.
  • 🧪Proof you ran it. At your own club, at least twice, with what went wrong written down.
  • ⚠️A safety note. What could hurt someone, and what stops it.
Send a proposal

● How an event becomes real

Proposed, trialled, adopted.

Stage 1

Proposed

Published as a draft with your name on it. Anyone can read it, build it and pick holes in it.

Stage 2

Trial

Run at real meets for a season, scored for medals but flagged amber. Rules change fast here, in public.

Stage 3

Adopted

Version 1.0. Stable wording, counts everywhere, and it stops changing mid-season.

Stage 4

Retired

If an event stops being fun, we say so and archive it. The packs stay online forever so anyone can still run it.

Every stage change is dated and explained in the changelog, including the ones where we got it wrong. A league that quietly rewrites its rules is a league you can’t plan a season around.