paris

Computer game: robots test their artificial intelligence on the pitch in last year's world cup in Japan. Credit: SPL/M. IWAFUJI/EURELIOS

Scientists determined not to be left on the sidelines as France hosts football's four-yearly world cup next month are organizing a parallel event in Paris, the annual Robot Football World Cup.

More than 60 teams of robots from major research centres worldwide will take part. The event will be the largest gathering of autonomous robots ever, and will test the prowess of the participating countries in robotics and artificial intelligence.

The matches are open to robots between 4.5 and 50 cm high, and each will last 20 minutes, with the largest robots playing five-a-side on a pitch the area of 20 table-tennis tables. The robots must play as a team autonomously; human intervention is allowed only in cases of “serious fouls or very abnormal behaviour”, such as attacking the goalposts.

Robot teams will be in permanent contact with their computer coach, however, which will analyse action on the pitch and send split-second instructions on tactics to the players.

The public competition is being organized at the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie in Paris from 30 June to 8 July. It is sponsored by RoboCup, a Swiss-based non-profit international association set up by researchers in artificial intelligence, and FIRA, a Korean-based organization that promotes work on cooperative autonomous robot systems.

The same venue will simultaneously host the 1998 International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems, the annual jamboree of artificial intelligence researchers.

The organizers say football poses a challenging task to robotic systems, as it tests their ability “to search, through real experimentation, the conditions for the emergence of collective intelligence”.

Such research will have applications in developing autonomous, cooperative robots for planetary exploration, military operations and domestic tasks, for example.

Leaving aside advanced cooperative algorithms, the ability of teams to ‘dribble’ — a difficult task for robots — may well be a key factor in determining the outcome of the competition itself. Winning, as in the real game, ultimately depends not on elegant play but on being able to put the ball in the back of the net.