Robocon
Robocon is the one the team travels for. DD Robocon India is the national stage of ABU Robocon, and the team that wins it represents the country against the rest of the Asia-Pacific.
ABU Robocon is the annual robotics contest of the Asian-Pacific Broadcasting Union. Every season it sets a new task, drawn from the culture of the host country, and every participating nation runs its own qualifier to decide who goes. India's qualifier is DD Robocon, run by Prasar Bharati with the Software Technology Parks of India and hosted on an IIT campus.
The 2026 national round was held at IIT Delhi on a theme taken from Kung Fu: robots built to duel, scored on speed and control, which in practice meant mechanical precision, computer vision and strategy decided in real time rather than in advance. The winning team went on to the Asia-Pacific round in Hong Kong.
Robocon is listed here as an outstation event because that is the shape of it. The season is eight or nine months of work done on this campus, in this lab, against a rulebook that is deliberately hard to satisfy, and then a few days somewhere else where the robot either does what it was built to do or does not. Machines, stock and bench space come from the lab; the team comes through the Robotics Society, which keeps its Robocon code in the open.
If you want in, the useful time to start is the month the theme is released, not the month before the contest. Talk to a coordinator.