It seems they are unbeatable. With a clear victory in the finals of the RoboCup in Istanbul against the Nao Devils from Dortmund (11:1 goals), the Bremen team B-Human has won the robot soccer world championship for the third time in a row. The overall performance during the tournament, scoring 62 goals and conceding only 1, shows that the robots made-in-Bremen are way ahead of the international field. For three years running, the team from the University of Bremen and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) has won all its matches in the annual robot soccer world championships by at least five goals – and this in spite of the fact that following each championship the B-Human team makes the software that runs its robots available to everybody as a download on its homepage.

27 teams from 18 nations in the Standard Platform League played against each other in Istanbul. Compared to the previous year, the number of robots per team was raised from three to four, which meant that the robots had to coordinate their play more strongly and had less space to move around in. Especially with regard to this last point, B-Human deployed a newly developed track planner which enables its players to slip through their opponents’ defense. Another novelty is the mutual ball model, by means of which each member of the team not only knows where the ball is at any time, even though it can not be seen, but which also enables the players to agree on who is to keep their eye on the ball. In addition to this, the agility of the players’ movements has been considerably improved, enabling them to take full advantage of the shots embedded in their motions: this meant that the B-Human robots were mostly able to keep the ball when tackled.

The B-Human team was developed in cooperation between the research area “Safe Cognitive Systems”, which sits in the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bremen. The team plays in the Standard Platform League of the RoboCup, the top league in robot soccer. All teams in this league use the same hardware: the humanoid robot Nao, manufactured by the French corporation Aldebaran Robotics. Hence, the challenge for the teams lies in developing the software which is used. In other words: in developing the artificial intelligence of the robots.