A League of Their Own

Last summer, over 100 teams gathered in Brazil to compete in 12th annual Robocup. Thousands of hours of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars came together directed towards a single goal: making robots to master the beautiful game.

The referee stands at midfield, holding a stopwatch in one hand a whistle in the other as the final seconds on the clock tick away. After two minutes spent lumbering past midfield up to the penalty mark, the Taiwanese robot is finally in position to shoot. This will be its final chance to score. The opposing goalie, a robot modestly named 'Thor' by its creators at UPenn and UCLA, stands centered in between the goal posts waiting for the final shot. Both robots are a little over four feet tall, or about the height of a eight-year-old child. The Taiwanese robot is all white and silver, light and delicate. UPenn's robot looks sturdier, made of shiny black metal plates locked together insect-style. Thor has looked strong throughout this week’s competition in Joao Pessoa, Brazil, winning its first three matches without the opposing team making a goal. But today, Pennn Masters student and robotics team member Larry Abraham is less confident. The robot from the National Taiwanese University of Science and Technology, dubbed 'HuroEvoluation', is lighter and faster on its feet. "This was expected to be a good game,"" Abraham says.

A crowd of around fifty people stand pressed up against the white fence along the edge of the pitch, cameras and phones in hand to record. Several kids are in the front row, gripping the barrier and leaning over for a better look.

With just a few minutes left to go the score is a narrow 2-1, advantage Penn. Time is running short, and the white robot is taking its sweet time with NTUST's final chance to equalize. "Forty-five seconds," the referee calls out. Slowly, HuroEvolution maneuvers around the ball to get the right angle to shoot. Twenty seconds. Nineteen seconds. Eighteen seconds. Seventeen seconds...

In some ways, the RoboCup resembles a similarly named competition that took place a week earlier on the other side of the Brazil. The energy of the audience. The dedication of the coaches and crew. The diversity of teams and fans from across the world, united by a common passion. The pride at stake.

Of course, there are a couple of key differences. The RoboCup field is about as long as two adjacent parking spots. One to seven players make up each team, and teams represent universities with strong computer science and mechanical engineering departments rather than countries. And then there are the players themselves: some of the world’s most sophisticated bots, ranging from 2-foot tall standing standard-platform bots to human-sized, highly customized machines like UPenn's goalie.

The first RoboCup took place in Nagoya, Japan in 1997, under the direction of University of Osaka academic Minoru Asada. Asada started the competition with a lofty goal--for the RoboCup champions to be able to beat the human winners FIFA World Cup by the year 2050.

While studying abroad in Japan last semester I visited Asada's lab at Osaka University. Associate professor Hiroki Mori went over the lab's main areas of research. Asada’s multidisciplinary team focuses on artificial intelligence and machine learning. The lab's best known creation is robot baby Affeto, which is equal parts cool and creepy. The reason for making childlike robots is simple--if robots look like children, people will treat them like children, speaking slowly and gesturing for emphasis. German associate professor Lars Schillingmann showed me an iCub, a friendly looking robot about the size of a 2-year old capable of showing expression with red LCD eyebrows and a mouth. Schillingmann slowly stacked three colored cups, one inside of the other as the robot watches, explaining his actions as he went. The robot clumsily repeated the action, frowning adorably whenever it made a mistake.

A trophy from last year's RoboCup occupies a prominent place on a shelf in the lab. The team from Osaka University took home first place in the adult sized humanoid division, the same competition in which Upenn's 'Thor' was entered this year. The Asada lab team won a narrow victory against the same Taiwanese team that UPenn’s team faced off against in Brazil this summer.

For Mori, the RoboCup has a special significance. He saw the first ever RoboCup in Nagoya when he was 15. , "That’s how I became interested in robotics,"" Mori says.

Japan has a long history with robotics. The island nation produces and employs more industrial robots than any other country on earth. According to data from the International Robotics Federation, Japan employs over 300,000 units industrial robots, making it the world’s most automated country. Outside of manufacturing centers, the Japanese penchant for automation is reflected in the ubiquity of the vending machines at every street corner, dispensing everything from museum entry tickets, to hot coffee, to restaurant orders to beer (no ID required).

Robots also hold a prominent place in Japanese pop culture. A 14-meter model of a giant fighting robot looks across Tokyo harbor, drawing millions of visitors each year. Astro Boy, widely regarded as the first ever anime at the time of its 1952 launch, features a friendly crime-fighting boy robot. Scholars like Heather Knight and Naho Kitano have argued that the traditional Shinto belief in animism (all things animate and inanimate have a spirit) contributes to Japan’s fascination with robots, particular in the consumer sphere.

According to SU computer science department chair Dr. Jae Oh, U.S. robotics research has historically been driven by the military.

"In Asia and other places, people have been more interested in creating robots that can actually live and breathe with human beings,"" Oh says. U.S. robotics is more focused around creating teams of robots to work together like a "platoon," as compared to Asia’s focus on one super-robot that performs multiple functions.

Eight U.S. teams made it to this year's RoboCup made it to this year’s competition in Brazil. Getting involved is a huge investment in money and time, says UPenn advisor Daniel Lee. Abraham mentions that some programs in the U.S. focus more energy on the DARPA challenge, a department of defense sponsored competition that deals with disaster relief. Unlike in the RoboCup, schools actually get paid for competing in the DARPA challenge. Lee uses a sports analogy for comparison: RoboCup is the Olympics, while DARPA is the NFL.

Many U.S. teams may choose to go to competitions closer to home, Dr. Oh suggests. Over the past few years teams from SU have gone to local and regional competitions including Micromouse (robot mice race through a maze), and the ION Robotic Lawnmower competition.

As you might have guessed from the tortoise-like pace of the humanoid division final, the robot Lionel Messi is a long way off. According the Abraham, the biggest challenges teams in the adult-sized humanoid devision face is walking quickly, without falling down--not exactly the stuff of sci-fi legend. Handlers have to stand behind the robots in case they fall over, to make sure no damage is done to technology worth roughly the same as a small suburban home.

That said, Dr. Lee says the competition has come a long way since he first became involved in 2002. He compares the early matches to 5-year old soccer. "Half the kids don’t even pay attention to the game,"" Lee says. "Every now and then someone will get the ball but they’re not sure what direction they’re supposed to kick it in."" Now, he says RoboCup teams have advanced to 11-year old soccer. The robots know to go after the ball, and they have some sense of how to coordinate as a team. Lee admits that beating a human team is still a long way off. But maybe not as far as you might think.

"If you think about what the world was like 30 years ago, 40 years ago, we didn’t even have computers at that time. We didn’t have cell phones or smartphones,” Lee says. “The pace of technological innovation is incredible right now."

In 1997, the year RoboCup was created, chess-playing robot Deep Blue beat world champion Garry Kasparof in six consecutive matches. In 2011, IBM’s Watson computer computed against Ken Jennings in Jeopardy and came away with a 1$ million dollar victory. I for one, am more than ready to see a robot bend it like Beckham.