This weekend the RoboCup Soccer finals took place in Eindhoven, Holland. Japan won the humanoid sized team final and Germany won the teen humanoid sized team final. There were also competitions for more robotic looking robots. The organisers of the tournament have an ambitious goal - by the middle of the 21st century they pledge that the winner of the RoboCup Soccer tournament will compete with and beat the winner of the FIFA World Cup.
Could be beaten by a 3 year old
Teams from 40 countries took part in the tournament which came ended with a "spectacular finals day" on Sunday. ABC News headlined their story of the finals "Move Over Messi, Here Come the Robots". But by 2050 the robots will have to improve a lot to match the likes of Lionel Messi. Speaking to ABC News, Marcell Missura of the University of Bonn said "To be honest, I think a 3-year-old could win against any of the humanoid teams". Missura's NimbRO team won the Teen Humanoid robot tournament in Mexico last year. He says that RoboSoccer is now "starting to look like soccer".
New strategies
At the RoboCup there are quite a few different categories of robots. People like to see the humanoid robots playing but "robots that are allowed to be robots" play a much better game right now. An Iranian competitor told ABC News how his robot teams use different kick mechanisms for passing or shooting and communicate each other's position via wireless. Furthermore they use a strategy; "If they are losing, they go on the attack, if they are winning, everybody goes to defence. Like Italians." A new software implementation at this event is "path planning" which allows one robot to pass ahead of another robot's trajectory on the pitch.
An interesting view of the games and the competition is taken by one of the competitors who says that on the pitch at the RoboCup "There are no mistakes: a robot does what it is programmed to do".
For more pictures and videos of the weekend's events have a browse of the RoboCup 2013 Flickr feed.
