RoboCup

A robot attempts to kick the ball at RoboCup 2013.

RoboCup is an annual international robotics competition founded[1] in 1996 by a group of university professors (including Hiroaki Kitano, Manuela M. Veloso, Itsuki Noda and Minoru Asada). The aim of the competition is to promote robotics and AI research by offering a publicly appealing – but formidable – challenge.

The name RoboCup is a contraction of the competition's full name, "Robot World Cup Initiative" (based on the FIFA World Cup), but there are many other areas of competition such as "RoboCupRescue", "RoboCup@Home" and "RoboCupJunior". Claude Sammut is the current president of RoboCup, and has been since 2019.

The official goal of the project is:

"By the middle of the 21st century, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players shall win a soccer game, complying with the official rules of FIFA, against the winner of the most recent World Cup."[2]
  1. ^ "RoboCup: The Robot World Cup Initiative". RoboCup. 1995. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.49.7511. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  2. ^ "RoboCup: Objective". RoboCup. 1998. Retrieved 2014-01-26.