The arena is a round ring with inner part of the ring being non-reflective black surface while the outer part of the ring is brightly colored and reflective. The ring also contains two brown marker lines.
At the start of each round, the two robots are positioned behind the brown marker lines in the ring with a random orientation.
A match consists of three rounds, each 60 seconds long.
A round ends when one robot goes outside of the ring and a point is awarded to the other robot. The point is awarded even if the robot is not pushed out of the ring but it moves or topples out of the ring by itself. The robot with the most points at the end of the match wins. If the round finishes with neither robot leaving the ring, no points are awarded.
All elimination rounds of this competition will consist of Simulation Matches. The final three rounds will take place on Hardware Platform.
Please note that participants are not expected to make the hardware part themselves. They are supposed to make a Sumo Robot application.
Choosing the right programming language that suits the participant is an important task. Microsoft Robotics Studio supports a wide variety of programming languages. Participants are free to use either C#, VB.NET or managed VC++ for coding their applications. However, the tool that comes along with the Sumo Robot competition kit creates a bare bones robot in C#.
The services are used with iRobot Create robots with an on-board CE computer and a mounted webcam.
The robots have a differential drive which allows them to move forward or backward at any angle and also to swivel in place.
The robots have left and right bumper sensors to sense contact with another robot and IR sensors on the bottom to detect a change in the IR reflectivity under the robot. The different reflectivity of the outer part of the ring allows the robots to sense when they are about to leave the ring.
For detailed description on Hardware part refer: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/robotics/bb403184.aspx