RoboCupRescue is an academic initiative to apply their Intelligent Systems research results to a social important domain. Various people worldwide participate in this initiative. Until 2006 there existed two leagues; a robot league and the simulation league.

Although both leagues aim at the same high level goal, they address the problem from opposite directions. Researches involved in the real robot league at the moment are developing systems composed by very few robots that are mostly teleoperated. Current crisp issues concern mobility, sensing, and so on. Autonomy and cooperation have not been yet deeply explored. On the simulation league instead, researchers are at the moment addressing the problem of coordinating huge teams of heterogeneous agents with high level capabilities. The gap between the two communites is then huge, although it is supposed to narrow in the future.

The goal of the Virtual RoboRescue League [1] is to create a bridge between these two communities.