They might not have the memory of kicking the ball, curving it up and down a wall of defenders and beating the goalkeeper to win the championship cup just like how football greats will recall their heyday but no one can deny that robot soccer players are a delight to watch.
Forty teams of robot soccer players flocked to Eindhoven, Netherlands for the 2013 Robot World Cup. The humanoids representing different countries have one goal in their chip brains - beat humans in soccer. The event took place from June 26 to 30.
"By mid-21st century, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players shall win the soccer game, comply with the official rule of the FIFA, against the winner of the most recent World Cup," stated the RoboCup website.
"We propose that this goal to be the one of the grand challenges shared by robotics and AI community for next 50 years. This goal may sounds overly ambitious given the state of the art technology today," it said.
At the moment, the likes of Leonardo Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo do not have to worry since the humanoid soccer players are still not that athletic, struggling to keep their balance and need a ton of work to mimic the athleticism of humans.
According to a report on PCMag, the different teams who joined the RoboCup use the event as a learning opportunity and a chance to learn more about robotics from different experts.
"It's definitely more than the time on the playing field. It's great learning experience for everyone on our team," said Andrea Palmer, co-leader of University of British Colombia's Thunderbolts, in an interview with The Vancouver Sun.
The RoboCup is organized into different categories. There is a division for robot soccer players as small as birthday cakes, mid-size R2D2-like robots and the larger humanoid players.
The first official Robot World Cup was held back in 1997. More than forty teams joined and the event had more than 5,000 spectators. It traces its roots to the Robot J-League that started in Japan back in 1993.
For the RoboCup, it is all about the best computer codes. For humans, it is all about the desire to win and the love of the game. That spells the gap that might be hard to bridge before 2050.
See the robot soccer players in action in the video below:
