Watch out, Spain. The 15th annual RoboCup concluded last weekend, and these machines are out for global domination.
The Cup, which includes five classifications and is comprised of 25 teams, is a means to promote robotics and Artificial Intelligence research. But there's another objective.
From the RoboCup website:
"We proposed that the ultimate goal of the RoboCup Initiative to be stated as follows:
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."
Something tells me these guys would have trouble against Spain or Brazil. But hey, they've still got 40 years:
The weekend also included a symposium where researchers presented on simple topics like "A Distributed Cooperative Reinforcement Learning Method for Decision Making in Fire Brigade Teams" and "Throwing Skill Optimization through Synchronization and Desynchronization of Degree of Freedom".
It might be hard to imagine robots ever beating humans in sports, but don't tell me you wouldn't want to see robots take on the world champs. That'd be one helluva match.
-- Follow Robbie Levin on Twitter @RobbieLevin.
