Meet the Robotic World Football Championship Team!

You might not expect a football team to be the star attraction at Asia’s biggest science and technology festival, but at the 2014/15 Techfest in Mumbai all eyes were on German team, Tigers Mannheim. The Tigers aren’t your typical band of footballers. Hailing from Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University the team is made up of six cuboid robots, each capable of passing a ball and scoring a goal without human control.

We’re all familiar with remote controlled robotics, from Scalextric to Robot Wars, but how can these robots work accurately without human manipulation?

Each robot on the Tigers Mannheim team is equipped with multi-directional wheels to aid fluid movement, but the key to their footballing prowess is in the complex algorithms that position the robots in the correct place to catch the ball, kick it on, or score a goal.

Overhead cameras track the coordinates of each player and the position of the ball, and send the data to team computers which use AI software to relay commands to the robots. According to Tigers Mannheim project leader, Nicolai Ommer, “It is not as easy as it looks to precisely kick a moving ball to a certain target” – a sentiment that most human footballers can also relate to.

The Tigers aren’t the only robot football team in the world – their contribution to Techfest was made in the hopes of qualifying for the RoboCup, to be held this year in Hefei, China. Teams from all over the world attend the annual tournament which is split into leagues based on the size and capability of the robots. Tigers Mannheim will compete in the Small Size League which is limited to teams of six robots no bigger than 18 cm in diameter and 15 cm in height, but other leagues see much larger - or even humanoid - robots competing for the title.

The eventual aim of the tournament is to defeat the winners of the human World Cup by 2050. While it may sound like a juvenile project, the technological implications of the advanced AI required to manage a robot football team could have huge potential that transcends sport. There’s just one question remaining: do they know the offside rule?

The Anatomy of a Robot

Although robots are indeed often associated with performing highly repetitive, routine applications, today’s flexible automation technology lends itself to much more than that, undertaking sophisticated precision tasks that a human cannot hope to emulate. For more information on this fascinating topic, read this article: The Anatomy of a Robot. 

Image Credit: tigers-mannheim.de