Robots, the next generation of soccer players

If you think a robot will steal your job, you are not
alone. Soccer players should be worried too. The next
Messi probably won’t be of flesh and blood but plastic
and metal.
The concept emerged during the conference
“Workshop on grand challenges in artificial
intelligence,” held in Tokyo in 1992, and independently,
in 1993, when Professor Alan Mackworth from
the University of Bristol in Canada described an
experiment with small soccer players in a scientific
article.
Over 40 teams already participated in the first
RoboCup tournament in 1997, and the competition is
held every year. The RoboCup Federation wants to
play and win a game against a real-world cup humans’
team by 2050.
The idea behind artificially intelligent players
is to investigate how robots perceive motion and
communicate with each other. Physical abilities like
walking, running, and kicking the ball while maintaining
balance are crucial to improving robots for other tasks
like rescue, home, industry, and education.
Designing robots for sports requires much more
than experts in state-of-the-art technology. Humans
and machines do not share the same skills. Engineers
need to impose limitations on soccer robots to imitate
soccer players as much as possible and ensure
following the game’s rules.
RoboCup Soccer Federation, the “FIFA” of robots,
which supports five leagues, imposes restrictions
on players’ design and rules of the game. Each has
its own robot design and game rules to give room
for different scientific goals. The number of players,
their size, the ball type, and the field dimensions are
different for each league.
In the humanoid league the players are humanlike
robots with human-like senses. However, they are
rather slow. Many of the skills needed to fully recreate
actual soccer player movements are still in the early
stages of research.
The game becomes exciting for middle and small
size leagues. The models are much simpler; they
are just boxes with a cyclopean eye. Their design
focuses on team behavior: recognizing an opponent,
cooperating with team members, receiving and giving
a standard FIFA size ball.
Today, soccer robots are entirely autonomous.
They wireless “talk” to each other, make decisions
regarding strategy in real-time, replace an “injured”
player, and shoot goals. The only person in a
RoboCup game is the referee. The team coaches
are engineers in charge of training the RoboCups’
artificial intelligence for fair play: the robots don’t
smash against each other or pull their shirts.

The next RoboCup competition will soon be
played, virtually, with rules that will allow teams to
participate without establishing physical contact.
Available at:<https://www.ua-magazine.com/2021/05/12/robots-the-
-next-generation-of-soccer-players>. Retrieved on: July 4th, 2021.
Adapted.