Looking ahead to the 2016 Olympics in Rio, it’s fun to fantasize about all the different ways to make the games better. The committee could introduce new sports1 like skateboarding or quidditch. Or they could bring back some lost Olympic sports like tug-of-war or pigeon shooting. Or they could simply replace all of the human athletes with robots, because that would be awesome.Lucky for all you android lovers out there, the international robot community already has its own equivalent of the Olympic Games. The FIRA Roboworld Cup 2012 is currently underway just a couple hours outside of London in the seaside town of Bristol. It’s a family affair with 26 teams from around the world gathering for four days of fun. The sports played include a number of different types of soccer games, weight-lifting, basketball and running. The grand finale comes on Saturday when the sprinting finals and the marathon event will be held.It goes without saying that the FIRA games are pretty different than the regular Olympics. Obviously, there are robots competing instead of humans, but the events themselves are tweaked to make them robot-friendly. For weight-lifting, the robots have to lift stacks of DVDs instead of discs of iron. For soccer and basketball, pint-sized humanoid robots compete on a scaled down field with the help of human trainers. The marathon isn’t measured in miles but rather meters — 42 to be exact. The sprint is a scant three meters, a distance that the robot from team Singapore cleared in a world record time of 31 seconds. And these robots are far from perfect. “To be honest we’d just be happy to finish the race,” confessed David Pollard from the Bristol University robotics lab. “At the moment our robot isn’t walking very well.”1 In fact, there will be three new sports debuting at the 2016 Olympics: sevens rugby, golf and kitesurfing.
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