Robots show their soccer skills ahead of RoboCup

Masayuki Kitano

FUKUOKA — Teams from Africa and Asia may have been the surprise of this year's World Cup, but by the middle of the century robots could be calling the shots.

That, at least, is the dream of the soccer-loving boffins who will gather in Fukuoka from June 19 to 23 — bang in the middle of the real thing — to watch their android creations battle it out for the RoboCup, an annual "soccer" event.

"Our goal is to defeat the World Cup champions using humanoid robots by 2050," Minoru Asada, vice president of the RoboCup Federation, told reporters in Tokyo on Wednesday.

For the time being, David Beckham need lose no sleep.

The 48-cm HOAP-1 robot showed off its skills, taking slow, halting steps toward an orange ball, rotating to one side and kicking it, to cheers from the reporters.

Asada admitted that the technology still had some way to go before teams of robots would be able to play soccer against each other, much less against human teams.

"Having humanoid robots play soccer is extremely difficult, it is challenging," said Asada, a professor specializing in emergent robotics at Osaka University.

Five research teams from Japan, three from Sweden and one each from Australia, Denmark, New Zealand and Singapore will bring two-legged robots to Fukuoka to demonstrate various "soccer" skills.

One serious aim of the RoboCup, which began in Nagoya in central Japan five years ago and was held last year in Seattle, is to develop robots that can safely operate alongside humans, said Hiroaki Kitano, president of the RoboCup Federation.

"They can't be allowed to cause injuries, even when there is a lot of contact," said Kitano, who is a project director for the Japanese government-funded Kitano Symbiotic Systems Project.

So robot footballers will be incapable of committing the cynical fouls seen during some of the World Cup games, but their disciplined approach might tempt the humans into such errors.

Asked how he thought the robots might one day score a winning goal against the World Cup champions, Kitano said: "Maybe from a penalty kick after being tackled from behind by an impatient human defender." (Reuters News)