SPARC introduces the exciting new European Robotics League (ERL), now including a novel major tournament category: ERL Smart Cities, in addition to the on-going competitions, ERL Consumer (previously Service), ERL Professional (previously Industrial) and ERL Emergency Service Robots. 

The ERL builds on the success of the EU-FP7/H2020 projects: RoCKIn, euRathlon, EuRoC and ROCKEU2 and is now run by the H2020 project SciRoc.

The European Robotics League local and major tournaments are based in Europe and are open to international participation. Teams will compete in three vibrant fields of robotics under the theme of smart urban enviroments. Competitors will engage in annual local tournaments organised by a consortium of Europe´s most prestigious robotics institutes. The biennial SciRoc Challenge (also known as the ERL Smart Cities Robotics Challenge) will be held in Smart Cities across Europe, where robots from all three categories will come together to interact with the smart infrastructure in familiar urban settings.

These competitions aim at replicating consistent benchmarking results more than stating a winner of a single event, and have been designed to target three clear objectives: the European societal challenge of aging population, the strengthening of the European robotics service industry and to push the state of the art in autonomous systems for emergency response.

In addition, robot competitions meet educational needs and can serve as an excellent platform for developing the skills of future engineers and scientists, raising student awareness and understanding of applied research and development in robotics.