Football-playing robots stage own World Cup

While the football world eagerly anticipates next year's World Cup in Germany, countries unlikely to trouble the FIFA engravers, such as Japan and the US, shared some of the glory as their robotic equivalents took to the field in a competition just as fiercely supported as the real thing.

Winners of RoboCup 2005, the annual world cup of robotic football, emerged after a five-day competition in Osaka, Japan, where artificially intelligent, football-playing bots scored the goals while computer scientists cheered them on from the sidelines.

Team Osaka, a human-modelled robot from Vstone and the Robo Garage at Kyoto University, won several titles in its category, including the Louis Vuitton Humanoid Cup for best biped humanoid. It also bested Germany's NimbRo, from the University of Freiburg, in a technical challenge and in the 2 versus 2 child-size competition for humanoids.

Germany's FU-Fighters, from Freie University in Berlin, turned around and beat Cornell University's Big Red from New York in the small-size league, in which robots are no more than 180mm in diameter and play with an orange golf ball on a field the size of a ping-pong table.

About 330 teams from 31 countries competed in the events that drew robotic participants from a two-legged humanoid robot league to a four-legged league using teams of Sony's Aibo robots as players. A team of six programmers from Spelman College in Georgia was the only undergraduate institution and the only all-women's institution to qualify for the Osaka competition, but they failed to win anything.

In the four-legged competition, teams of four entertainment robots played using an orange ball, with all the computation done on the board computer. In that race, Germany's University of Bremen in Berlin defeated Australia's NuBots from the University of Newcastle.

RoboCup is designed to advance research and education about robotics and artificial intelligence, and is followed by a two-day symposium on the topic. Its lofty goal by 2050 is to assemble an autonomous humanoid football team that will compete against the human World Cup champions, in compliance with the official FIFA rules.

Computer scientists behind RoboCup chose football over say, chess, because it's not only the most popular sport worldwide, but it also poses many of the same dynamic challenges in life that are problems for artificially intelligent objects. Those include identifying relevant objects (robots determine this by colour), playing in harmony with a team and working with moving challengers.

The humanoid robots can perform basic football skills, such as shooting or defending. Sometimes, however, humans have to intervene in play because some of the robots are tele-operated.