This year's RoboCup Finals took place last month in Eindhoven where the home team Tech United consolidated its dominance in the Middle Size League by becoming World Champions for the  8th time. In the Standard Platform League, team B-Human were the winners for the 11th time and in the Humanoid League,  RoMeLa won for a 6th time with its new ARTEMIS robot.

RoboCup 2024 attracted 50,000  visitors with 300 teams and 2,000 participants from 45 countries, with the Soccer competitions being well attended.

The first RoboCup was held in Japan in 1997 and since then scientists and students from all over the world have used to test and demonstrate their robots. Over the years competitons for rescue robots and home robots capable of performing domestic chores have been added, but the initial focus on soccer is still the main area of interest as progress is made towards "crazy idea" that by 2050, a team of humanoid robots would be able to take on and beat the best human players. 

Already the competion is over halfway to this deadline and while there are now some full-size bipedal robots taking part they are hardly "playing soccer". Yes they can kick a ball but the contest is akin to a penalty shoot-out with two players per side, one defending the goal the other attempting to send the ball into the oppenent's goal and the elements of  teamwork and strategy and moving nimbly around the pitch and all noticeable by their absence.

You can see the latest standard in this video snippet of the Humanoid League Adult Size final between Team NimbRo from the University of Bonn and Team RoMeLa from UCLA, which the latter's ARTEMIS (standing for Advanced Robotic Technology for Enhanced Mobility and Improved Stability) robots won convincingly 6 goals to 1. 

As winners of the Adult Size contest, ARTEMIS robots went of to  go on to play again real humans in a 3-a-side informal match, The fact that there are so many humans are on the pitch is because each ARTEMIS has a humn minder whose role is to ensure that no harm comes to ther robots, a very real risk given that in one of the warm-up games one of ARTEMIS robots tripped and fell, breaking both arms.    

ARTEMIS is the latest soccer-playing robot designed by Dennis Hong, Director of the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa) formerly at Virginia Tech and now at UCLA. 

ARTEMIS made its debut at RoboCup 2023, now represents the state of the art for adult-size humanoid robots. Standing 4 feet, 8 inches tall and weighing 85 pounds, it is capable of running, jumping and walking up to 2.1 meters per second, and is able to remain steady even when shoved or pulled with force. It's special attribute of kicking a ball with some force is provided by actuators devices that generate motion from energy that were custom-designed to behave like biological muscles. Even so I can't imagine that a team of these robots are going to prevail against professional human footballers in 25 years time.

Photo Credit: UCLA

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info