Soccer ‘Bots

(Inside Science TV) -- They may not look like your kind of world cup soccer match players, but robots are taking the field by storm in a battle of the soccer ‘bots.

They’re about six inches tall, pretty speedy on the field, completely autonomous – meaning no remote control is used by humans.

They kick, pass, catch the ball and occasionally, score a goal!

The robots, developed by grad students at Carnegie Mellon University located in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania – were created to compete in a robotics competition called RoboCup.

But how do these robots work as a team?

On top of each robot is a color-coded dot. Cameras mounted above the field use the dots to determine the position of each robot. Computers on the sidelines develop player strategies and send commands to the robots wirelessly.

The teamwork happens within a loop of commands from robots, to cameras, to computers and back to the robots -- in less than one-fifth of a second and it all happens fifteen times per second!

The future of robot soccer has even bigger, better plans and players.

Organizers of the competition hope that by the year 2050 – a team of completely autonomous human-sized robot soccer players will play against the real human winners of the official world cup that year.

The CMU team came in fifth place in the 2015 RoboCup games held in china, and they’re already practicing and gearing up for the 2016 world RoboCup in Germany.

Get Inside The Science:

Manuela M. Veloso, Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science

CMU’s Soccer-Playing Robots Score Fifth International Robocup Win

RoboCup 2016: http://www.robocup2016.org/en/about/robocup-2016/