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Can These Soccer Playing Robots Beat Humans by 2050?

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...

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.

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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.

See more Robocup action on this Youtube channel and the official Robocup gallery, and read more about robots on Motherboard.