Robot Football in Times of Pandemic

Empty stadiums, strict hygiene rules — no problem for footballing robots. Yet for more than a year, the pandemic has brought play to a standstill for the high-tech kickers. That’s because their human masterminds have not been allowed to accompany them to tournaments, a hard blow for Team B-Human from the University of Bremen and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DKFI). But now humans and robots have done an end run around the virus and successfully competed in their first virtual tournament in Germany — a completely new challenge for the winning Bremen team.

The enduring world champions from Bremen, who by the way have been supported by the alumni association for years, overcame this hurdle in their usual manner: three games, three victories. The difference: the six participating teams sent only their robots to the Germany-wide tournament, which took place in Bremen and Dortmund. "The real difficulty was that we had to play with robots that were assigned to us and that didn't belong to us," explained computer scientist Tim Laue. "In principle, they are all identical in construction, but there are many individual variations that you have to check." Mr Laue co-founded the robotics team more than ten years ago and is still as enthusiastic as he was on the first day. At the virtual tournament, the teams were able to install their software on the robots two hours before the start of the game and calibrate it during a course inspection. The teams of scientists then followed the games on a YouTube live stream.

The quality of the software is the key to success — running, dribbling, shooting, all without falling over — and a student from Bremen recently perfected these processes in his master's thesis. Three scientists and ten students currently form the human team around the robots. "In Bremen, we benefit from the fact that some students have been with us for three or four years, some from their bachelor's degree all the way through their doctorate. Because if you want to work on the further development of the software, you first need six to nine months of training," said Mr Laue. What is being developed here in an almost playful manner has a serious purpose: it creates the basis for future robots that can be employed in medicine or in the home. This know-how should also help the B-Human team to further victories — hopefully soon at the first virtual world championship in June.