Can England still bring home the World Cup from Brazil?

Football success in Brazil may not be over yet for England.   Although England’s national team failed to make the knockout stages of the FIFA World Cup, the University of Hertfordshire’s robot football team, the ‘Bold Hearts’, is set to fly out to Brazil next week to compete in the 2014 RoboCup robotics world championship – taking place in João Pessoa, Brazil, 19 – 24 July 2014.

Robot teams from around the world, including the USA, Japan, China, Germany as well as the UK, take part in the RoboCup competition which hosts a series of tournaments in various robotic disciplines, the most prominent of them being football. The concept behind these competitions is to provide a uniform and comparable test-bed for progress in robotic research. Teams use state-of-the-art artificial intelligence with the aim that by 2050 a team of robots will be able to take and beat the best human players – to be the world champions!

Dr Daniel Polani, Researcher and Reader in Artificial Life and Team Leader of Bold Hearts at the University of Hertfordshire, said: “We’ve been taking part in the RoboCup competition since 2003.  And this year we have been making significant advances with our robots.  To succeed at RoboCup competitions, it is not sufficient for robots to operate well in laboratories they have to prove themselves in a novel environment and in adversarial circumstances against opponent teams. We have built on our success in the simulation league, where artificial intelligence software controls virtual reality robots, aiming to become one of the best humanoid robot football teams now that we are in the humanoid hardware league.”

In the RoboCup humanoid competition, the robots are fully autonomous – humans are not allowed to control the robots remotely during a game. Only at the beginning of the game, the robots receive a "start" command and begin playing. They can communicate with each other, but are not allowed to use external computers or commands.  Every decision must be computed on board by the robot itself. This is the extremely difficult challenge that the RoboCup community has set itself as a target.

Dr Polani continued: “In 2013, Bold Hearts made the transition from a pure simulation team to a team of hardware humanoid robots.  Despite the transition, we made a great start in the competition series. This year, we have focused on expanding our abilities – and we’re really proud and excited that our team took 2nd place at the RoboCup German Open (April 2014) and 3rd place at the RoboCup Iran Open (April 2014), ahead of some very well-established and strong teams.  So that’s set us up really well for the RoboCup World Championship in Brazil at the end of July.”

Just like the national teams taking part in the FIFA World Cup, the humanoid robot teams need to be able to score goals and communicate with each other.  The Bold Hearts team has been very successful in scoring goals – a good attribute to have, you may think.  But what if they are own goals? For example, in the first game at the German Open 2014, Bold Hearts won 4:2, but Bold Hearts scored all six of the goals! So Bold Hearts' goal scoring ability was clearly indisputable! However, this result showed a clear need to put a ‘direction-detecting’ module urgently into action.

Dr Polani added: “Implementing the ‘direction-detecting’ module definitely had the desired result – with no further own goals.  But the Bold hearts robots became what could be described as more ‘cautious’ and ‘hesitating’. “

“While this would be sufficient for a good placing at the Open competitions in Germany and Iran, such hesitation would not be good enough at the World Championship in Brazil. So we have had to put our efforts into making the Bold Hearts team more forceful and decisive, improve situational awareness, and we incorporated past experience from the simulation competitions to achieve better team play - so robots on the team would pay more attention to each other.”

The RoboCup competition highlights the challenges and promises of the future of robotics.  As the University of Hertfordshire Bold Hearts RoboCup team prepares to fly to the world championship in Brazil, England not only has  an opportunity to win a football world championship, but University of Hertfordshire researchers play an international part in the overall future of robotics.

ENDS

For more information, please contact Julie Cooper, University of Hertfordshire Press Office on 01707 284095, Email: j.cooper5@herts.ac.uk

Notes to Editor

About the University of Hertfordshire

The University is the UK’s leading business-facing university and an exemplar in the sector.  It is innovative and enterprising and challenges individuals and organisations to excel. 

The University of Hertfordshire is one of the region’s largest employers with over 2,650 staff and a turnover of almost £233 million.

With a student community of over 27,200 including more than 2,800 students from eighty-five different countries, the University has a global network of over 175,000 alumni. 

It is also one of the top 100 universities in the world under 50 years old, according to the new Times Higher Education 100 under 50 rankings 2012.

For more information, please visit www.herts.ac.uk

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