Rescue Line Simulator: train for RoboCup without a field, a robot, or a budget

A Rescue Line practice field costs hundreds of euros. A competitive robot costs thousands. That is the barrier that keeps most schools in the world out of robotics competitions. A browser tab costs nothing. So we built one: the Rescue Line Simulator.

What you can do

Build courses. Straights, curves, T and cross junctions with green markers, gaps, obstacles, and an evacuation zone with silver and black victims. Click to place a tile, click again to rotate it. The whole course serializes into the URL: share the link and you have shared the course.

Program the robot. A code editor runs right next to the field. You write a loop(robot, state) function in JavaScript with an API modeled on how real Rescue Line robots perceive the world: an 8-sensor reflectance bar, color sensors for the green markers, a distance sensor for obstacles and walls, a gripper, and a zone camera that returns ball detections as angle and distance, the same shape of data a camera pipeline gives you on real hardware.

Score your runs. Gaps, obstacles, intersections and victims all score points. Lose the line for five seconds and you take a lack of progress, back to start, exactly the discipline a real tournament enforces.

The default program that loads on first visit is a complete working example: PID line following, green-marker turns, obstacle avoidance and a basic evacuation strategy. Read it, break it, beat it.

What it will not do

A simulator will never replace a real robot. Motors stall, sensors drift, batteries sag, and none of that happens in a browser. But the hard thinking of Rescue Line, the control loops and the state machines and the zone strategy, transfers one to one. A team can arrive at its first real field with working logic instead of a blank file.

Try it

It runs at sim.washingmachine.click, free, no account, works on a school Chromebook. The code is MIT licensed on our GitHub: issues and pull requests welcome. Seesaw tiles, sensor noise, a course library: there is plenty left to build, and we would love help building it.