Smart Home League Competition Rules

1. Purpose of the league

The Smart Home League is an educational and competitive platform run under the umbrella of the international FIRA robotics competitions. Its first goal is to educate and inspire: instead of memorising concepts, a student solves a real problem — how can a vacuum robot explore and clean an unknown house using nothing but sensor data?

That is why the rules are written to keep cost and barriers to entry as low as possible: the entire competition runs inside a free simulator, no hardware is required, and every sample controller and world file is published openly. If you are not yet familiar with the competition itself, read the guide to the robot vacuum league (in Persian) first, then come back here.

2. Age divisions and eligibility

The league has three sections. A team registers in exactly one, and every team member must meet that division's age condition:

First Step deliberately has no minimum age: a child who has just met loops and conditions should be able to join without fear. U19 is the hardest division — it gives teams more capability (precise localisation and energy management) and expects a correspondingly more sophisticated algorithm in return.

Teachers and club leaders registering several teams at once will find the practical side — room setup, lesson order and how to split students between divisions — on the schools and coaches page.

3. Programming language

The official language of the league is Python. The reason is simple: it is readable, it has an enormous amount of learning material in both English and Persian, and a student can get a robot moving in the very first session. All the sample controllers and the base code for every division is written in it.

• Nothing to install: the app carries its own Python, so every team runs the same version as the judges.
• In the U19 division, more advanced languages may be used. Clear it with the technical committee beforehand so your entry is guaranteed to run on the judging setup.

If you have never written a robot controller before, the step-by-step Python robot programming guide takes you from an empty file to a robot that drives, senses and cleans.

4. Platform and software

The entire competition runs inside the official league app. Every team must use the version published here, so that physics, sensor behaviour and timing match the judging environment exactly.

4.2 What is inside the app

5. The robot and its sensors

The robot is ready-made and identical for everyone — no team builds hardware. No advantage comes from the machine; it comes only from the quality of the algorithm. What changes between divisions is which senses the robot is allowed to have. Every variable whose sensor is not fitted reads -1.

In First Step the sensor rig is fixed and the only choice a team makes is its colour. Every robot is ready-made this season: the only choice is the team colour. The compass arrives in U14 and the position sensor in U19.

Because First Step and U14 have no position sensor, the robot has to work out where it is from the rangefinders, the compass and the colour of the floor — and that limitation is exactly what makes the problem interesting.

6. Game structure and the arena

• Two robots, head to head: a match is Team 1 against Team 2 in one house. Each team picks its own robot colour (red and blue are the defaults) and the in-game coin flip decides who starts bottom-left and who top-right.
• One map per round, handed out an hour early: every match of a round is played on the same map. Teams receive that map about an hour before play and get 45 to 90 minutes in quarantine to code for it; the exact time is announced per round.
• The house: 22×22 tiles of 62.5 cm — hall, kitchen, three bedrooms and a bathroom. All three divisions play it; what differs is the sensors and the rules that are switched on. Rugs and the floor under furniture never score. One room has a door that opens by itself; U14 and U19 add a cat and a dog as moving obstacles; U19 adds water puddles that cost battery.
• 180 seconds: every division plays the same three-minute clock, and there is no overtime. The super team's clock is announced on match day.

The consequence of this design is that memorising one path does not work. The winning algorithm is the one that performs well on any map, including a map the team has never seen. To test yourself against varied layouts, build your own practice houses with the 3D map editor.

7. Battery and wireless charging (U19 only)

In the U19 division the robot runs on a battery that drains while it works. A wireless charging pad stands in a fixed spot in the house, and its coordinates are sent to both robots at the start of the match as dockx and docky — nothing is hidden. These are the numbers the simulator actually uses:

The referee's stuck watchdog is paused while you are charging — but it starts again the moment the battery reads 100 %, so camping on the pad is not a strategy: charge, then leave. Waiting beside a pad another robot is using is legitimate queueing, not being stuck.

Waste disposal is switched off this season. The emptying station is not placed in the competition houses, the dust bin never fills, and dumpx / dumpy read -1. It stays in the rulebook for the season it is turned back on.

This gives U19 teams a second problem on top of cleaning: energy management. When should the robot abandon cleaning and head for the pad? Is the detour worth it, or is it better to clean a few more tiles first? A rough estimate of the trip home is distto(dockx, docky) / 25 percent of charge — plus a fat margin, because the real path is never a straight line. Decisions like these are what separate good teams from great ones.

8. Scoring — the cleanliness metric

A match is scored in tiles. Every floor tile a robot cleans turns its colour and is worth one point; whoever owns more tiles when the 180 seconds are up wins the match.

To see how these scores are recorded in practice, look at the match results page and the awards and final standings.

8.1 Who owns a tile — the last cleaning wins

Every floor tile the robot drives over turns its colour and is worth one point, and the last cleaning wins: clean over a tile the rival has already cleaned and it becomes yours. This is on in all three divisions. Rugs and the floor under the furniture are never counted, and the scoreboard also shows what percentage of the house has been cleaned.

8.2 Getting stuck and relocation

Only one thing takes cleaned tiles back off a team: a relocation. The rule is the same in all three divisions, and it applies whether the referee's system fired it or the referee pressed the button.

The fine is a flat 2 tiles in First Step, U14 and U19; in Superteam it is 5, then 10, then 12 tiles, taken off the floor the team has actually painted — two tiles turn white again. Below 10 tiles there is no fine at all, so one early tangle cannot pin a beginner to the bottom of the table. There is no cap on relocations and nothing to request: the watchdog acts on its own. A random, far landing spot is deliberate: a relocation must never feel like a free lift to a better place.

Two exceptions keep the watchdog honest: a robot taking on charge is not stuck (the clock is paused until the battery is full), and a flat battery is not stuck either — a robot that cannot move is not relocated and not fined.

8.3 A draw is a draw

There is no overtime. When the clock runs out the result stands; level scores are recorded as a draw, worth one point to each team in the table. A drawn knockout game is not extended either — it is played again, the same two teams on the same map, until one side wins. This keeps a competition day predictable: no match ever runs past 180 seconds.

8.4 How many teams, which format

A division is played head to head and the format follows the size of the field. One match takes about 8 to 10 minutes of arena time, so an arena fits about 40 matches a day; a full round-robin needs n×(n−1)÷2 of them, and that is where the line is drawn.

Swiss, in short: round 1 is a random draw; from round 2 the table does the drawing — teams on equal points are paired with each other, nobody meets the same opponent twice while the mathematics allows it, and an odd field gives a bye (a win with no tiles) to the lowest team that has not had one. Points: win 3, draw 1, loss 0. Tiebreaks, in order: points, tile difference, tiles scored, Buchholz (Swiss only), then a draw by the referee. The live table is on the competition page.

8.5 The technical challenge and the technical interview

Besides the matches, teams take a technical challenge (missions such as wall following, room-to-room navigation and avoiding a moving obstacle) and a technical interview, where every member must be able to explain every part of the code, including any library or helper the team used. How these count changes from year to year: some years they carry their own separate award, other years they feed directly into the overall score. Which it is, and with what weight, is announced before each event.

9. Fair play

The Smart Home League is a classroom before it is a competition, which is why professional and sporting behaviour is part of the rules rather than a side note:

• No cheating — in any form: not in the code, not in the declared ages of team members, not in the judging process.
• No exploiting loopholes — if a technique technically works but plainly violates the spirit of the competition (for example, subverting the simulation machinery instead of solving the cleaning problem), it counts as a violation.
• No tampering with the world files, the supervisor or the scoring mechanism.
• Respect for other teams, judges and the technical committee is required.

Penalties: the response to a violation depends on its severity and can range from a warning and a score deduction up to full disqualification from the competition. If you are unsure whether a technique is allowed, ask the technical committee before the match — asking costs nothing.

10. Code of conduct and original work

The code a team submits must be the team's own work. Plagiarism — copying another team's code or a ready-made solution from the internet — is prohibited and is handled under section 9.

• Using the sample controllers shipped with the project as a starting point is entirely allowed; they exist to be learned from.
• Using documentation and tutorials to learn concepts is allowed; copying another team's solution outright is not.
• Team members must be able to explain their own code. If the technical committee asks about part of it, the team is expected to walk through the logic.
• Teams are responsible for backing up their code and having the final version ready before the match starts.

11. Organiser discretion

Every competition runs into situations nobody planned for: a power cut, a software fault, ambiguity in a rule, or a team's particular circumstances. In such cases the decisions of the organisers and the technical committee are final and binding.

The organisers may also update technical details — such as match duration or map specifics — before a season starts. Any change is announced through the league's official channels, so follow the Telegram channel in the run-up to a competition.

12. Match-day checklist

Walk through this once on your own computer before any competition day, so nothing surprises you when it counts:

1. The league app is downloaded and open.
2. Your division is selected.
3. Your team's code is loaded in Match mode, and the code status line shows the file you meant.
4. Press Start once and watch a full match run without a code error.
5. Keep a backup of your final code on a USB drive or in cloud storage.

A step-by-step install walkthrough lives in the quick-start section of the home page, and a fuller explanation of the competition is in the robot vacuum league guide.

13. Official documents

The complete, authoritative version of the rules is published in the two documents below. This page exists for readability and searchability, but in any conflict the official documents take precedence:

14. Contacting the technical committee

For any question about the rules, an ambiguous clause, or a technical problem getting the simulator running, use these channels:

Frequently asked questions about the rules

Next step

Now that you know the rules, the best thing you can do today is run the sample robot on your own machine and start changing the code. If you have not installed anything yet, you can practise straight away — the same competition opens in your browser, with nothing to install.

Download the tools and start Awards and final standings What is the vacuum robot league? قوانین به فارسی