Robocup

The 20th annual Robocup launches today, with 3,500 participants from 400 countries battling it out in a series of robotics competitions including a Fifa-sponsored football tournament.

"The RoboCup Federation has been pursuing its objective of developing intelligent humanoid soccer-playing robots which by 2050 will be able to beat the current Fifa champions," said RoboCup on its website.


Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences professor Gerhard Kraetzschmar said in his opening message for the festival he was confident a team of humanoid robot football players will "win a soccer game played according to official rules of Fifa, against the winner of the most recent Fifa World Cup" by 2050.

There is also a "disaster rescue section".

"Disaster rescue is one of the most serious social issues, which involves very large numbers of heterogeneous agents in the hostile environment," RoboCup wrote.


"The intention of the RoboCupRescue project is to promote research and development in this socially significant domain at various levels involving multi-agent team work coordination, physical robotic agents for search and rescue, information infrastructures, personal digital assistants, a standard simulator and decision support systems, evaluation benchmarks for rescue strategies and robotic systems that are all integrated into a comprehensive systems in future."

Another category aims to "develop services with relevance for domestic applications" such as caring for the elderly and performing tasks like cleaning. This involves machines navigating domains such as human-robot-interaction and cooperation, navigation and mapping in dynamic environments, computer vision and object recognition under natural light conditions, object manipulation, adaptive behaviours, behaviour integration, ambient intelligence, standardization and system integration.

RoboCup takes place from June 30 to July 4 in Leipzig, Germany.