FIRA SimuroSot — Robot Football With No Hardware at All

SimuroSot is FIRA's fully software-based robot football. No robot is built, no part is bought and nothing breaks. You write the team brain and the simulator does the rest.

Why it is an ideal starting league: zero cost, unlimited practice at home, and immediate feedback. A student can change one strategy detail and see the result across ten matches straight away. No hardware league offers that learning loop.

What you actually write

For each player, you decide what it should do at every instant given its own position, the ball, teammates and opponents. That means answering:

Which player chases the ball? (One — not all of them.)
Where should the others stand to cover space?
Where will the ball be in a moment? (Predict, don't react.)
When to pass and when to shoot?
How do you recover into a defensive shape after losing the ball?

How a team progresses

Stage zero: everyone chases the ball. Inefficient, but it runs.
Stage one: fixed roles — a striker, a defender, a keeper.
Stage two: dynamic roles; whoever is nearest becomes the striker.
Stage three: predicting the ball's path instead of reacting to its position.
Stage four: deliberate passing and team shape.
Stage five: parameter tuning via automated testing over hundreds of matches.

Most student teams plateau between stages two and three — which is exactly where the real competition begins.

Skills built

Applied geometry (angles, intercepts, prediction), complex conditional logic, code structure and above all algorithmic thinking. For a student who has just learned to program, SimuroSot is the best way to see their code come alive.

A bridge to other leagues

The code you write here is the logical foundation of what runs on real robots in MiroSot. Many teams win in simulation first, then move to hardware. In the other direction, RoboCup Soccer Simulation is the heavier, more research-oriented version of the same path.

Frequently asked questions

What does SimuroSot require?

An ordinary computer and programming knowledge. No robot or components at all.

What age can start?

For a student comfortable with conditions, loops and functions, around age 12 is realistic.

Does it help with hardware leagues?

Yes — the strategy and decision logic is nearly identical, and many teams mature their code in simulation before porting it.

Want to compete with code alone?

Novin Zehn competition teams train from zero to the world stage — in Tehran and live online.