RoboCup

RoboCup is an annual international robotics competition proposed and founded in 1997. The aim is to promote robotics and AI research, by offering a publicly appealing, but formidable challenge.

“Competition pushes advances in technologies. What we learn from robots playing soccer or navigating a maze can be applied to industry and help us solve difficult real-world problems,” according to Professor Maurice Pagnucco, Head of the School of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW.

The name RoboCup is a contraction of the competition's full name, "Robot Soccer World Cup", but there are many other stages of the competition such as "RoboCupRescue", "RoboCup@Home" and "RoboCupJunior". In 2016, the world's competition was held in Leipzig, Germany. RoboCup 2017 will be held in Nagoya, Japan.

The official goal of the project:

The contest currently has six major competition domains, each with a number of leagues and subleagues:

Each team is fully autonomous in all RoboCup leagues. Once the game starts, the only input from any human is from the referee.

The formal RoboCup was preceded by the (often unacknowledged) first International Micro Robot World Cup Soccer Tournament (MIROSOT) held by KAIST in Taejon, Korea, in November 1996. This was won by an American team from Newton Labs, and the competition was shown on CNN.

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