Robotour — robotika.cz outdoor delivery challenge, is originally Czech contest of autonomous robots navigating on paved park roads. Robots carrying payload (five liter barrel) get extra points. The contest is annual on falls. The first year was in 2006 in Prague, park Stromovka. Next contest will be on 18th of September 2010 in Slovakia/Bratislava.

Field Robot Event is outdoor contest of autonomous robots. Motivation is from agriculture while the origin is rather academic. The task for robots is to quickly navigate in a real maize field without damage of plants. The contest is international and travel around Europe. The next place is Braunschweig/Germany and date 11th-13th June 2010.

Contest „robot, go straight” organize Radioklub Písek since 2009. The task seems to be easy at first sight: go with the robot as far as possible on straight park road (Palackého sady, Písek). In reality even this task is relatively difficult. Compete can even small cars (mostly modified toys) without sensors in separate category. We highly recommend this contest to teams who think about participation in Robotour or other outdoor contests.

ELROB is not contest with winners and losers but rather demonstration of robots. It was probably a reaction to successful American Grand Challenge, but the motivations could different. Robots are presented in various categories and they are mostly teleoperated. Moreover there alternate military and civil years. In 2010 it will be military ELROB in Germany/Hammelburg near Wurzburg (17th-20th May 2010).

Eurobot is originally French contest of autonomous robots. The theme and detail rules change every year, but there are several common attributes: the play field is approximately 3x2 meters, two teams compete against each other and the time limit is 90 seconds. There are national and international rounds. The nearest international is on 26th-30th May 2010 in Switzerland/Rapperswil-Jona, and the foregoing Czech round is on 1st May 2010 in Prague.

Istrobot is Slovak contest, which takes place annually in spring (March/April) in Bratislava. There are three categories: tracker (line following with various traps like tunnel, interruption or brick obstacle), micromouse (navigation in large maze) and finally free style for various robot demonstrations. The nearest contest will be on 17th April 2010.

Robot Challenge is Austrian contest of autonomous robots, which takes place annually at the beginning of spring in Vienna. It is possible to compete in may categories from parallel slalom (line followers), puck collect, sumo of various sizes to free style and sprint of humanoid robots. Registration if free of charge and there is no age restriction (to be precise it is 9 to 99 years). The nearest date is 20th-21st March 2010.

The American DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) announced in 2002 big challenge for ground autonomous vehicles. The goal was to self-navigate hundreds of miles from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. In 2004 nobody made it so the original price (one million dollars) was doubled. In 2007 there was also Urban Challenge (navigation in a small army town), but it was probably the last contest of this series.

The Swiss company Cyberbotics organize once a while a contest of control programs in its Webots simulator. The last years contests required programming language Java, but the pay-off was a possibility to watch matches on-line. Even this was primarily advertisement, it was possible to solve interesting tasks in this free Webots contest edition.

Robocup is well known mostly due to the robotics soccer and medialized goal to beat human world champions to year 2050. There is also a category Rescue with motivation to help in natural disasters. Robots are mostly teleoperated and their task is to find in model collapsed house human victims (figurines). The contest is annual but used to have quite high registration fee (740 EURO in 2003).

In 2002 prof. Erwin Prassler and Martin Hagele from Fraunhofer Institut organized international contest of cleaning robots. The contest took place in Switzerland and it was a part of IROS 2002 conference. There was category of window cleaning, floor cleaning and ideas for household robots. Unfortunately this was also the last year because promises of sponsors were not fulfilled.