Here’s an ironclad prediction about this Sunday's World Cup final: Whoever scores the winning goal, the foot or head that sends it into the net, whether German or Argentine, will be made of flesh and bone, not metal and plastic. In another decade or two, that might not be true.
Ensuring it won’t is the goal of RoboCup, a robot soccer tournament that will take place in Joao Pessoa, Brazil, in late July. RoboCup happens every year, but the quadrennial events have a special significance: When Japanese artificial intelligence researcher Hiroaki Kitano founded the competition in 1997, it was with the mission that a team of autonomous humanoid machines will be capable of defeating the reigning World Cup champions by 2050.
That vision doesn’t look as fanciful as it did when Ann Miura-Ko made it to the quarterfinals as a member of a Yale University team in 1998. It was the second RoboCup and the first in a World Cup year; like the FIFA tournament, it was held in France. “Everyone’s robots were crashing all the time,” recalls Miura-Ko, now a venture capitalist and co-founder of Floodgate Fund. “If you kept yours running, you were doing fairly well. With random motion, you’d eventually get one robot to accidentally push a ball into the goal.”
Nowadays, the robots are scoring on purpose -- occasionally even against human opponents, says Esther Luna Colombini, this year’s co-chair. The wheeled ones, in particular, can be formidable, she says: "Sometimes they're so fast, you can't even understand what's going on." (You can see some of that speed on display in this video of one of last year's finals.)
RoboCup itself has matured, too: The inaugural tournament hosted 38 teams from 11 countries; this year’s will feature 550 teams from more than 45, competing in separate divisions for humanoid and wheeled robots and in non-soccer competitions for the best domestic and rescue ‘bots.
That expansion mirrors a suddenly voracious appetite among Silicon Valley giants like Google, Facebook and Amazon for all things robotic. Kiva Systems, a robotics company Amazon bought for $775 million in 2012, was in fact started by a team of RoboCup champions from Cornell University. As Miura-Ko notes, the engineers working on Google’s driverless cars are trying to solve many of the same problems she and her teammates grappled with back in 1998, problems like navigating a complex environment and predicting the movements of others. (Hopefully Google's cars can avoid the constant crashes.)
More than 1 billion people watched at least part of the last World Cup final. Robocup's matches won't command nearly as wide an audience -- but you can be sure the titans of the tech industry will be keeping tabs on who wins.
