Berlin: In the next few years, football world powers like Brazil, Argentina, Italy or Germany may be in for some really tough competition - from none other than humanoid robots!
These humanoid robots can already be seen in action at the 'RoboCup 2006', an international football tournament that kicked off on Wednesday in Bremen.
As many as 440 teams from 36 countries are competing in the 10th edition of this unique annual event.
Being held in Germany for the first time, the five-day tournament has robots slugging it out in 11 different leagues or categories for simulation robots, small and middle sized robots, as also four-legged and humanoid ones.
A number of matches are also having live commentary provided by a pair of robots developed by scientists from Carnegie Mellon University in the US.
Organisers say their ultimate aim is to develop by 2050 a team of humanoid robots that can beat the human World Cup football champions.
"RoboCup 2006 is the first step towards a communal vision. This vision includes the development of a humanoid robot team of 11 players, which can win against a human soccer world champion team," Minoru Asada, President of the RoboCup Federation, said on the official website.
The tournament, followed by a two-day symposium, will also offer about 2,500 experts from all over the world a chance to come together and hold discussions on artificial intelligence and robot engineering.
"After 50 years of research within artificial intelligence, it has been determined that these things can be better researched using soccer than the game of chess. We have advanced a fair bit for this 10th year of RoboCup," said Hans-Dieter Burkhard, Vice President of the Federation.
In the humanoid league there are teams from countries like the US, Canada, Germany, Japan as also Singapore and Iran.
The previous RoboCup was held in Osaka, Japan while the next one will be staged in Atlanta, USA.
The game involves robots playing both individualistic (each agent/robot must identify relevant objects, self-localise, dribble) and cooperative (passes, complementary roles) elements in a dynamic and adversarial environment.
Some of the names of the teams in fray this time around make interesting reading - Brainstormers Tribots, Eigen, Microsoft Hellhounds, Araibo Persian Gulf MRL, AIS/BIT Robots; FU-Fighters, Skuba and The Orient.
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