CoSpace Rescue Simulation — in Persian امدادگر فضای مشترک — is a RoboCupJunior league with one unusual property: you need no physical robot at all. The arena is a 3D software world, and what you build is the robot's brain, not its body.
The "shared space" in the name is literal: two teams play simultaneously in the same world. Your robot is not only fighting the field — it is reacting to an opponent's decisions.
What actually happens in a CoSpace run
Your virtual robot is dropped into a simulated environment and must score as much as possible within a time limit. The field typically contains:
- Coloured scoring objects to collect, each colour worth a different amount.
- A deposit area where the load must be delivered — collecting alone does not bank points.
- Traps and obstacles that cost penalties or stall the robot.
- Walls and narrow corridors that make navigation hard.
- A super object that appears under specific conditions and is worth a lot.
The robot sees the world only through virtual sensors: colour sensors underneath, distance sensors in several directions, and its approximate position. Everything else is your decision.
Three layers of skill
1. Basic control
First the robot must move without getting stuck: detect walls, clear obstacles, escape corners. Most beginner teams stop here — their robot wedges into a corner and stays there until time runs out.
2. The state machine
The robot must know "what am I doing right now?" — searching, carrying, returning to deposit, escaping a trap. Writing that as a clean state machine is the difference between a tangled 50-line script and code you can keep extending.
3. Scoring strategy
This is where matches are won. The real questions: is a low-value object worth crossing half the field for? When should you bank your load rather than risk losing it? When do you chase the super object and when do you ignore it? Champion teams rarely have more complex code — they have better arithmetic.
Mistakes that eliminate teams
- Optimising speed before reliability. A fast robot that jams in the first 30 seconds scores zero.
- No stuck-recovery routine. Every successful robot has an "if no progress for N seconds, reverse and turn" fallback.
- Testing on one map only. Code tuned to a single world fails on the competition world.
- Ignoring the opponent. In a shared space, objects the opponent reaches first are gone. Strategy has to account for that.
- Not reading that year's rules. Scores, sizes and super-object conditions change between editions.
What students actually learn
Despite looking like a game, CoSpace teaches exactly the concepts that are central to real robotics and AI: the sense–decide–act loop, state machines, managing scarce resources, optimising an objective function and behaving in a competitive environment. Many students who start here move on to the Soccer Simulation league or into AI.
CoSpace at Novin Zehn
At Novin Zehn Academy the CoSpace course is led by Nima Nazari, the academy's founder and competition-team coach. The syllabus deliberately follows the three layers above: rescue the robot from getting stuck, clean up its logic, then work on scoring strategy. The final sessions run as a mock competition with a referee and a stopwatch, so students meet competition-day pressure before competition day.
For the fundamentals first, start with What is CoSpace?
Frequently asked questions
What hardware does CoSpace need?
No robot at all — just a laptop able to run the simulator. That makes it the cheapest RoboCupJunior league to enter.
What ages is it for?
Roughly 10 to 19, within the RoboCupJunior age brackets. A basic grasp of conditions and loops is enough to start.
Who teaches CoSpace at Novin Zehn?
The Novin Zehn CoSpace course is led by Nima Nazari, the academy’s founder and competition-team coach.
Want to compete in CoSpace?
The Novin Zehn CoSpace course, led by Nima Nazari, takes students from the first line of code to competition-day strategy. All you need is a laptop.
Register / free consultation Novin Zehn CoSpace course