As national teams from all five continents battle to win the 2010 Soccer World Cup in South Africa, a league of 3,000 robots from more than 40 nationalities are waging their own World Cup in Singapore . In Robocup 2010 , the automatons will compete on a soccer field to try to score the maximum number of goals and stop the greatest number of shots, under rules very similar to those of the human championship that contemplate, for example, expulsion in case of serious foul or penalty shootout if there is a tie.
The fundamental challenge is to ensure that each year the robots can communicate and coordinate better with each other through team strategies. One of the most interesting research plots is the one that focuses on making decisions to make the robot more autonomous, for example to decide whether to stay in goal or go out in search of the ball. The ultimate objective of the project is “to develop for the RoboCup 2050 a team of completely autonomous humanoid robots that are capable of winning the human team that is world champion in soccer “, according to the organizers.
Spain attends the meeting with possibilities, since at the beginning of the year the team formed by the Polytechnic University of Valencia and the University of Murcia was proclaimed the winner of the ROBOCUP Mediterranean Open 2010 , analogous to the European football championship.
In addition to football (RoboCupSoccer), a star category, three other types of competition are held: skill in rescue operations (RoboCupRescue), innovative ideas proposed by people under 19 years of age (RoboCupJunior) and efficiency in performing household chores (RoboCup @Home).
