Watching these humanoid robots battle it out on the soccer field, you quickly realize that Kylian Mbappé and his fellow professionals really have little to worry about. At least, for now.
The footage (top) was captured last week in Beijing at the RoBoLeague World Robot Soccer League, China’s first-ever three-on-three humanoid robot soccer league.
It shows shows a semi-final game fought between the Vulcan Team from Tsinghua University and the Blaze Light Team from Beijing Information & Science Technology University. The AI-powered robots in all of the games were fully autonomous, with no human intervention or remote control allowed during play.
For humanoid robots, they’re pretty impressive when it comes to kicking a ball around. But compared to their professional counterparts, they’re still something of a lost cause.
Watching humanoid robots play soccer is great entertainment, however. Some of them don’t appear to have any idea what’s going on, while others stumble around as if they’ve been imbibing some kind of made-for-bots booze. Where they do excel over their human counterparts, however, is in the way they quickly get back on their feet after taking a tumble, eschewing the kind of absurd theatrics that you often get in pro soccer games.
And while the robots’ movements are sometimes clumsy, with frequent falls and pileups, they do nevertheless demonstrate an impressive ability to autonomously respond to fast-changing scenarios on the field.
The RoBoLeague is primarily designed to showcase China’s advances in robotic technology, with the best players able to demonstrate skills like agility, coordination, balance, strategic decision-making, object interaction and, of course, fall recovery.
The contest is also a warm-up for next year’s World Humanoid Robot Games, where we’ll see robots facing each other across a range of sports.
The humanoid robot sector is a highly competitive one and huge sums of money are being poured into their development. While China is making some notable advancements, U.S.-based companies, among others, are also working hard to create bots able to perform human tasks efficiently with a view to putting them in the workplace, or even offering them as home helpers.
