RoboRacer Sim Racing League @ ICRA 2026

About

RoboRacer Autonomous Racing is a semi-regular competition organized by an international community of researchers, engineers, and autonomous systems enthusiasts. The teams participating in the 27th RoboRacer Autonomous Racing Competition at ICRA 2026 will write software for a 1:10 scaled autonomous racecar to fulfill the objectives of the competition: drive fast but don’t crash!

This time, we are organizing the fifth RoboRacer Sim Racing League, which leverages AutoDRIVE Ecosystem to model and simulate the digital twin of a RoboRacer racecar within a virtual racetrack. Please see the accompanying video for a glimpse of the RoboRacer digital twins in action.

The main focus of the Sim Racing League is a virtual competition with simulated cars and environments, which is accessible to everyone across the globe. For the ICRA 2026 competition, each team will be provided with a standardized simulation setup (in the form of a digital twin of the RoboRacer vehicle, and a digital twin of the Porto racetrack) within the high-fidelity AutoDRIVE Simulator. Additionally, teams will also be provided with a working implementation of the AutoDRIVE Devkit to get started with developing their autonomy algorithms. Teams will have to develop perception, planning, and control algorithms to parse the real-time sensor data streamed from the simulator and generate control commands to be fed back to the simulated vehicle.

The competition will take place in 2 stages:

• Qualification Race: Teams will demonstrate their ability to complete multiple laps around the practice track without colliding with the track bounds at run time.
• Time-Attack Race: Teams will compete against the clock, on a previously unseen racetrack, to secure a position on the leaderboard.

Since the vehicle, the sensors, the simulator, and the devkit are standardized, teams must develop robust racing algorithms that can deal with the uncertainties of an unseen racetrack.

Tip

If you are interested in autonomously racing physical RoboRacer vehicles, please check out the website for 27^th RoboRacer Autonomous Racing Competition, which will be held in person at ICRA 2026. You can always register and compete in both physical and virtual competitions!

Organizers

Dr. Rahul Mangharam	Dr. Venkat Krovi	Dr. Radu Grosu	Dr. Ezio Bartocci
Dr. Johannes Betz	Chinmay Samak	Tanmay Samak	Ahmad Amine

Timeline

Warning

Timeline is subject to change. Please keep checking this page for any updates.

DATE	EVENT
Feb 23, 2026	Registration Opens
Apr 30, 2026	Registration Closes
May 09, 2026	Qualification Round Submission
May 10, 2026	Qualification Round Evaluation
May 11, 2026	Qualification Results Declared
May 12, 2026	Competition Track Released
May 16, 2026	Final Race Submission
May 17, 2026	Final Race Evaluation
May 18, 2026	Competition Results Declared

Following is a brief summary of each event:

• Registration: Interested teams will register for the Sim Racing League.
• Qualification Round: Teams will demonstrate successful completion of 10 laps around the practice track provided ahead of time.
• Qualification Results: Standings of all the qualified teams will be released.
• Competition Track: Organizers will release the actual "competition track", which will be used for the final race. This track may be replicated in the physical race as well.
• Final Race: Organizers will collect containerized algorithms from each team and connect them with the containerized simulator. Performance metrics of each team will be recorded.
• Competition Results: Standings of all the teams for the final race will be released.

Info

The RoboRacer Sim Racing League will be held approximately 1 week ahead of ICRA 2026 and the performance metrics will be made available to the teams. Discussions are underway with the ICRA organizing team to allow teams to analyze and present their approach/results in a short (~10 min) presentation in a special session at ICRA 2025.

Resources

AutoDRIVE is envisioned to be an open, comprehensive, flexible and integrated cyber-physical ecosystem for enhancing autonomous driving research and education. It bridges the gap between software simulation and hardware deployment by providing the AutoDRIVE Simulator and AutoDRIVE Testbed, a well-suited duo for real2sim and sim2real transfer targeting vehicles and environments of varying scales and operational design domains. It also offers AutoDRIVE Devkit, a developer's kit for rapid and flexible development of autonomy algorithms using a variety of programming languages and software frameworks. For the Sim Racing League, teams will develop their autonomous racing algorithms using the AutoDRIVE Devkit to interface with the AutoDRIVE Simulator in real-time.

RoboRacer is an international community of researchers, engineers, and autonomous systems enthusiasts. It is centered around the idea of converting a 1:10 scale RC car into an autonomous vehicle for research and education; check out the documentation to build your own RoboRacer autonomous racecar. Additionally, if you are new to the field of autonomous racing, you can refer to the complete course material, which is open sourced. If you already have some experience with autonomous racing, feel free to delve deeper into the research enabled by RoboRacer. Lastly, you can also check out the physical RoboRacer races that are being organized all around the world. For the Sim Racing League, teams will not require a physical RoboRacer vehicle; however, the learning resources can certainly be useful to get your autonomous racing fundamentals right!

We recommend all the teams interested in participating in the RoboRacer Sim Racing League to get accustomed with the competition. Following are a few resources to get you started:

• Competition Documents

  ---

  Learn about the competition rules and technical aspects of the framework.

  Competition Rules

  Technical Guide

• Docker Containers

  ---

  Download base container images for the competition and start developing your algorithms.

  AutoDRIVE Simulator: explore | practice | compete

  AutoDRIVE Devkit: explore | practice | compete

• Local Resources

  ---

  Get started with the competition framework locally, and worry about containerization later.

  AutoDRIVE Simulator:

  explore    Linux | Windows | macOS

  practice  Linux | Windows | macOS

  compete    Linux | Windows | macOS

  AutoDRIVE Devkit:

  ROS 2

• Quick Links

  ---

  Links to be kept at your fingertips, for a smooth ride throughout the competition.

  Schedule: Timeline

  Registration: Form

  Documentation: Rule Book | Tech Guide

  Communication: Slack

  Submission: Phase 1 | Phase 2

  Results: Phase 1 | Phase 2

Question

You can post general questions on the AutoDRIVE Slack workspace; this is the preferred modality. Technical questions can be also posted as GitHub Issues or GitHub Discussions. For any other questions or concerns that cannot be posted publicly, please contact Chinmay Samak or Tanmay Samak.

Registration

This competition is open to everyone around the world - students, researchers, hobbyists, professionals, or anyone else who is interested. A team can consist of multiple teammates. Teams with only one person are also allowed. However, a person cannot be a part of more than one team.

Registration Form

Registration for the Sim Racing League is free of cost and separate from the Physical Racing League and the conference/event registrations themselves. The above form signs you up only for the Sim Racing League. Although you can participate in the Sim Racing League without attending the conference/event, we strongly encourage all competition participants to attend the conference/event in person. This will help you connect with the broader AutoDRIVE and RoboRacer communities, and you can also witness/participate in the physical RoboRacer autonomous racing competition!

Registered teams are added to the following table:

SR. NO.	TEAM NAME	TEAM MEMBERS	ORGANIZATION	COUNTRY
01	Neuromorphic Racer	Joy Vithayathil	Indian Institute of Technology (ISM), Dhanbad	India
02	Macan Malaya	Giovanni Dejan	Universiti Malaya	Indonesia
03	AutoTurbo	Pavan Kalyan Majjiga	Barigo Holdings, Inc.	United States of America (USA)
04	HSMNF Racer	Hamdan AlHajeri Mohammed Islam Maher Abdul Gafoor Feras Shihab Nevan John Thomas	Khalifa University	United Arab Emirates (UAE)
05	Abdulrahman Mahmoud	Abdulrahman Mahmoud	Personal	Egypt
06	KU - TeamOne	Shahad Rikas Zain Hasan Ahzem Manzeer Ahmed Zeeshan Harinath Ranjit	Khalifa University	United Arab Emirates (UAE)
07	Maxed-Out	Greg Maxwell	Personal	United States of America (USA)
08	Black Arrow	Aswin Srinivasan Dinesh Kumar Venkatachalapathy Rohit Hemachandra Pillai Sree Raadhai Manikanda Sharma Aravindhakumar Manimaran Tharun Kamaraj Magadapalli Sathyanarayanan Shanmugadasan Ravi Sri Vaishnavi Sudapalli Charisma Tammina Khushi Naik	Personal	Germany
09	MoonLit Robotix	Karthik Nambiar Ayushman Saha Deepanshu Raj	Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal	India
10	KU SPARCy	Zayed Muhammad Abdullah HaidarSaif Mohamed Abdelmaksoud Sulaiman AbuQamar Hanadi Aljeaidi Dana Alkindi Ghala Alblooshi	Khalifa University	United Arab Emirates (UAE)
11	bracavisionai	Luis Bracamontes	bracavisionai	Mexico
12	Dexter Dynamics	Abhinav Joshi	Personal	India

Note

The above table will be updated with newly registered teams within a few days of registration. Please contact Chinmay Samak or Tanmay Samak if you do not see your team entry for more than 7 days after registering.

Submission

Each team is expected to submit a containerized version of their autonomous racing software stack. Submissions for each phase of the competition will be handled separately.

Note

We expect that upon running your submitted container, all the necessary nodes should start up (the autodrive_devkit API we have included as well as your team's racing stack). Once we hit the Connection Button on the Menu Panel of AutoDRIVE Simulator, the simulated vehicle should start running. Please make sure that you include all the necessary commands (for sourcing workspaces, setting environment variables, launching nodes, etc.) within the entrypoint script (autodrive_devkit.sh file) provided within the autodrive_roboracer_api container. Please do NOT use ~/.bashrc or other means to automate the algorithm execution! Competition organizers should be able to start additional bash session(s) within your submitted container (without your codebase executing every time a new bash session is initialized) for data recording and inspection purposes. Also, make sure to add detailed instructions to your Docker Hub repository overview, which explains how to download (specific tag) and run your container image step-by-step.

Use the secure form below to make your team's submission for Phase 1 (Qualification Round) of the RoboRacer Sim Racing League. Please fill in your team's name and add the link to your team's DockerHub repository containing the autonomous racing stack. If you are using a private repository, make sure to add autodriveecosystem as a collaborator to your repository.

Phase 1 Submission Form

Warning

Phase 1 submission window will close on May 09, 2026 (anywhere on Earth). Please contact Chinmay Samak or Tanmay Samak if you have any questions.

Use the secure form below to make your team's submission for Phase 2 (Final Race) of the RoboRacer Sim Racing League. Please fill in your team's name and add the link to your team's DockerHub repository containing the autonomous racing stack. If you are using a private repository, make sure to add autodriveecosystem as a collaborator to your repository.

Phase 2 Submission Form

Warning

Phase 2 submission window will close on May 16, 2026 (anywhere on Earth). Please contact Chinmay Samak or Tanmay Samak if you have any questions.

Results

Phase 1: Qualification

Phase 1 results will be posted here on May 11, 2026.

Phase 2: Competition

Phase 2 results will be posted here on May 18, 2026.

Summary

A summary video will be posted here after the competition.