They are not as nimble-footed as their human counterparts, but they can score a goal or two. They are quite awkward when it comes to tackling opponents and are hardly aware of what a foul is. They don’t have much of a following either because they don’t possess any kind of technical finesse to show off. They don’t even have the style or follicular foibles to attract football buffs. They only have technology aficionados as their supporters who believe that these hi-tech players are slowly making great strides towards challenging real soccer champions to the game by the end of 2050 ? somewhat like the computer Deep Thought taking on chess grand masters like Gary Kasparov. While people across the world were busy wowing the consummate artistry of the likes of Ronaldo, Zinedine Zidane and David Beckham, these humanoids or robots had a field day fighting for RoboCup 2006 in Bremen, Germany. The 10th annual soccer championship for robots, held at the Bremen Exhibition Centre from June 14 to June 20, had 440 teams (totalling 2,500 participants) from 36 countries, including the US, Germany, Japan, China, Portugal and Iran (and not India!). While the FIFA World Cup will throw up just one victorious team, the RoboCup 2006 had 33 winners ? 11 of them were German teams ? in various leagues of the tournament. Though there were no headers from the players and no player was seen ripping off jerseys after a win, some of the other trappings of the game were definitely visible ? blocked shots, penalty cards, to name just two.

While people across the world were busy wowing the consummate artistry of the likes of Ronaldo, Zinedine Zidane and David Beckham, these humanoids or robots had a field day fighting for RoboCup 2006 in Bremen, Germany. The 10th annual soccer championship for robots, held at the Bremen Exhibition Centre from June 14 to June 20, had 440 teams (totalling 2,500 participants) from 36 countries, including the US, Germany, Japan, China, Portugal and Iran (and not India!). While the FIFA World Cup will throw up just one victorious team, the RoboCup 2006 had 33 winners — 11 of them were German teams — in various leagues of the tournament. Though there were no headers from the players and no player was seen ripping off jerseys after a win, some of the other trappings of the game were definitely visible — blocked shots, penalty cards, to name just two.

The brainchild of Japanese scientist Hiroaki Kitano, who launched the project in 1990 when he was a guest lecturer at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, in the US, RoboCup is actually an international venture to promote and take to newer heights research on artificial intelligence (AI). The primary objective is to integrate different technologies like design principles of autonomous agents, multi-agent collaboration, strategy acquisition, real-time reasoning and sensor-fusion and create fully autonomous robots that can be used to do such real world tasks as search and rescue operations, military campaigns and even housekeeping. It also provides researchers with a platform for improving upon AI software.

IN A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN: (From top) A bomb-defusing robot made by the US company, iRobot; a miniature humanoid robot made in Tokyo. The robot is capable of walking and doing some basic physical exercises

How football helps

Football had been chosen as a ‘primary domain’ because it is the most popular sport in the world and can be readily understood. Moreover, the game, as RoboCup Federation (an organisation comprising leading universities and research institutes from Europe, America and Asia) members put it, has many aspects to it that need to be adopted by next generation technologies. These features include teamwork, real-time perception and decision and high-level of motion control. “After 50 years within artificial intelligence it has been determined that these things can be better researched using soccer than the game of chess,” says Hans-Dieter Burkhard, vice president of the RoboCup Federation.

“The RoboCup tournament addresses a major topic of intellectual interest — how you make pieces of software and mechanical devices work and talk to each other,” says Professor Vijay Kumar, chairman of the department of mechanical engineering and applied mechanics at the University of Pennsylvania. His was one of the few US teams that made it to the quarter finals. “Tournaments such as these are a great platform for attracting students to engineering and robotics,” adds Kumar. It takes almost a year to design a soccer-playing robot and create the required program and code. And like real soccer players, the robots have to put in long hours of practice and face tough competition in the qualifying rounds.

The participants in the championship are required to compete in several sections, depending on the type of robots. Some of the sections are Simulation League, Small Size Robot League, Middle Size Robot League, Four-Legged Robot League and Humanoid League (which was introduced in 2002). In addition to football, robots also take part in Dance Challenge and Rescue Challenge as part of the event.
As the name suggests, the Small Size Robot League deals with pint-sized players (15 cm in diameter) that operate in a ping pong table converted into a soccer field. They play with an orange golf ball. For Middle Size Robots, the dimensions of the field for Small Size Robots are increased threefold.

A RoboCup match spans two equal periods of 10 minutes. Each team can have a maximum of five players who are entitled to an interval at half time. The interval must not exceed five minutes. Allowance is made in either period for the time lost through substitutions, timeouts, waste of time, etc. You even have red and yellow cards for unsporting robotic behaviour.

The robots are programmed to choose the best moves in a given situation. Once the game begins, the players are completely left on their own. In other words, they are not remote controlled by their creators. Relevant objects like the goal posts, ball and walls of the field are painted in different colours so that the robots can distinguish them from one another.

In the Small Size category, a video camera above the field keeps tabs on the ball, goals and all the robots. The information is fed to an off-court computer, which decides on strategy and tells the robots how to move. In the Middle and Four-legged leagues, the robots carry their own cameras, allowing each to operate autonomously.

The Humanoid League seems to be the most important part of the tournament. This year, Team Osaka Kid Size from Japan won the title with Nim Bro Kid Size from Germany finishing as the runner up. The final scores were 9-5 after extra time as scores were tied at 4-4.

In the humanoid league, fully autonomous robots with a human-like body plan and senses take part. Most of them are designed by participating researchers and scientists, but some commercially available robots are also allowed. The robots are grouped into two size classes: Kid Size (60 cm in diameter) and Teen Size. Once the play begins, help from outside the field is strictly prohibited.

Dynamic walking, running, and kicking the ball while maintaining balance, visual perception of the ball, tackling other players and the field, self-localisation and team play are among the many research issues investigated in the Humanoid League. One particular challenge in the league is maintaining the balance while the robots are walking and kicking the ball. If the robots fall down, they must get up by themselves again.

Ready for real world tasks?

Information scientists associated with the RoboCup assert that robots have advanced considerably since the time the championship came into being. Earlier, robots didn’t move very fast and they often missed the ball. But the game is now getting faster and more sophisticated. “The quality of playing has advanced tremendously,” says Martin Riedmiller, a neuro-informaticist at the University of Osnabrück in Germany, who is the coach and chief scientist of the university’s Brainstormers Tribots, a team consisting of four-wheeled robots. “Not only are the robots now capable of kicking the ball high, they also have developed a sense for tactics and the different roles for attackers and defenders.”

The RoboCup hasn’t till date inspired any distinct product used for real life situations. Robots are being used for rescue and search operations in some countries, though. For instance, some robots that took part in the RoboCup Rescue Challenge were used during the rescue operation following the 9/11 attacks. Researchers say it will take a few decades before they can build foolproof machines in this regard.

But if 2050 is the target, it does seem to be quite a long way to go. Explains the Federation, “The Wright brothers’ first flight was in 1903. Apollo 11 landing on the moon was in 1969. In 1947, de Havillant, a British company, sold a jet airliner. ENIAC developed in 1947, and Deep Blue beat human chess champion in 1997. Watson and Crick identified the structure of DNA in 1953. The human genome sequence was completed in 2001. Fifty years are enough.”