ROBOT DOWN!

Humanoid Robots Face Off in Insane Soccer Tournament

The RoBoLeague competition featured three-on-three matches played by completely autonomous robots.

Chinese engineers showed this weekend that robots can play soccer. In a first-of-its-kind event, teams of three autonomous humanoid robots faced off Saturday in a bizarre but memorable tournament. Beijing-based Booster Robotics collaborated with four Chinese universities to design the humanoid soccer players, with the company providing hardware and teams of students designing the algorithms that power the robots’ decision-making. The child-sized humanoids, which looked something like a cross between C-3PO and E.T., shuffled and waddled around the pitch—often ending up face-up on the ground. Humans entered the fray only when a robot needed to be stretchered off the field, which happened several times. The champion of the tournament was Tsinghua University’s THU Robotics team, which beat out the robots from China Agricultural University by a score of 5-3. These matches were just the tip of the iceberg for inter-robot athletics in China. A robot half-marathon took place in April, and on August 15, the first World Humanoid Robot Games will kick off in Beijing.