The goal of the annual Robocup soccer competition isn’t just to have a good time watching robots engage in some pretty slow-moving sports. The idea is to develop autonomous robots that can beat humans at soccer by the year 2050.Watching this year’s final match of kid-sized robots (held in Singapore, between two German teams) makes it hard to imagine that happening. Of course, the same could be said for a handful of other technological breakthroughs and achievements of the past century. And if Ray Kurzweil is right about the Singularity hitting us in the 2030s, the World Cup could become a much more unifying event for humankind earlier than researchers now expect.To make the game – if not the development of the robots – go faster, try this music that happened to be playing on an Internet stream – a remix of “Memories” by Oriol.The robots seen here are modified versions of the Nao robot, which has also been programmed to be emotional (we interviewed one here).But the kid-sized robots aren’t the only kind involved. There’s also the much more efficient small-sized robots, which rely on wheels. Here is their final match:And here are the qualifying videos for the U.S.‘s leading contenders: DARwin and CHARLI, kid-sized and man-sized robots, respectively, from the University of Vermont. The latter, one of only a handful of working full-sized humanoid robots in the world, was built for the measly cost of $20,000. Honda’s Asimo prototype, by contrast, costs upwards of one million dollars.But both robots have a long way to go before they can start ripping off their jerseys and beating their chests in glory: both were hobbled by technical problems during their matches. And yet, despite a lost balance censor and broken gears during his quarterfinal match, CHARLI managed to walk again and pull off a victory in the game.
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