In China, for the first time in history, a football tournament was held with the participation of fully autonomous humanoid robots. All machines acted independently, without human intervention, using only their own artificial intelligence, informs Bloomberg.
The final part of the Robo League competition held in Beijing brought together four teams of humanoid robots that played without external control. The victory was won by the THU Robotics team from Tsinghua University, defeating rivals from Mountain Sea – representatives of China Agricultural University – with a score of 5:3.
The match took place in the “three on three” format. The robots were controlled by artificial intelligence algorithms, which determined their actions completely autonomously without human intervention. This allowed them to recognize the ball from up to 18 meters away with 90% accuracy, detect the goal, the boundaries of the pitch and the players of the opposing team, and make decisions – from passes to shots on goal – based on the information received.
“Such demonstrations are designed to ignite people’s imagination”, – explained Semir Menon, founder of the American company Dexterity.
In his opinion, soon the world will see thousands of types of robots and millions of applications – and each such event brings the future closer. The tournament was held in the Yizhuang Technology Development Zone and is seen as a preparation stage for the upcoming World Games of Humanoid Robots, which are also to be held in Beijing.
A key feature of the matches was the complete exclusion of human intervention: the robots did not receive any instructions from the outside. Each team consisted of three autonomous humanoid robots that made decisions based on sensor data and artificial intelligence algorithms.
