After Euro 2024, here comes the robot football World Cup

So the Euro football championship ended on Sunday with Spain’s victory over England in Berlin, the RoboCup begins on Monday July 15 in Eindhoven in the Netherlands. It’s the Robot Football World Cup. This tournament brings together universities and research laboratories from 45 different countries. It has been held every year since 1997 with the aim of creating a team of fully autonomous robots that would one day be able to beat a human world champion football team.

For now, Mbappé and Griezmann don’t have much to worry about. Rolling robots are already very advanced: they have a tactical sense, they move very quickly. On the other hand, bipedal robots move very slowly, they are hesitant, clumsy and often fall. This competition is above all a pretext to promote studies in artificial intelligence in robotics. It is easier to motivate students to create a robot that plays football, dribbles, and scores goals rather than an industrial robot that screws and bolts.

The advances in artificial intelligence are the stuff of fantasy. In recent years, computers have beaten the best chess players, bridge players, poker players, and even the best drivers on car racing simulators. However, when it comes to physically moving around, things are much more complicated.

While RoboCup has been around for 27 years, work on android robots began even longer ago. However, researchers are still struggling to create machines with the same dexterity and versatility as a human. Picking up a pin that has fallen on the ground is already quite a challenge for a robot. Dribbling a football player is therefore not for tomorrow, the teams have set themselves this goal for 2050. Robot lawyers or accounting robots may see the light of day sooner than soccer robots or others capable of cleaning.