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IN PICTURES: 2014 RoboCup German Open robots soccer tournament

Fantastic photos from the 2014 RoboCup German Open robots soccer tournament currently taking place in Magdeburg.

The 2013 RoboCup German Open robots soccer tournament in Eindhoven, Holland, a year before the 2014 RoboCup competition in Germany
RoboCop fancied being Beckham for the day (Image: Ralf Roletschek / roletschek.de)

The 2014 RoboCup German Open is in full swing, check out these photos from the cutting-edge robots soccer tournament currently taking place in Germany.

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Wikipedia tells us that:

RoboCup is an annual international robotics competition founded in 1997. The aim 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 Soccer World Cup”, but there are many other stages of the competition such as “RoboCupRescue”, “RoboCup@Home” and “RoboCupJunior”. In the U.S robocup is not very big, with the national competition being at New Jersey every year, but in other countries it is very popular. In 2013 the world’s competition was in the Netherlands. In 2014 the world competition is in Brazil.

The current competition is being held in Magdeburg, North West Germany and is set to run until the 5th of April.

The official goal of the project is that:

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.

… a game Burp will be eagerly anticipating!

In the meantime, don’t miss these pictures from the 2014 RoboCup German Open robots soccer tournament.

This year the robot football players are all Aldebaran Robotics Nao models: