Robot World Cup kicks off

This year's RoboCup features 440 teams from 36 countries battling for 33 world championship titles

The robot equivalent of the World Cup has kicked off in Bremen, Germany, with 440 teams from 36 countries battling for 33 world championship titles. 

RoboCup runs until 18 June and includes leagues for simulation, small and middle size robots, as well as four-legged and humanoid robots, among others. 

"After 50 years of research with artificial intelligence, it has been determined that these things can be better researched using soccer than the game of chess," said Hans-Dieter Burkhard, vice president of the RoboCup Federation. "We have advanced a fair bit for this 10th year of RoboCup."

The ultimate goal of the RoboCup project is to develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots by 2050 that can win a match against the human World Cup champions.

So far in the competition, TeamOsaka beat NimbRo TeenSize in the Humanoid TeenSize category by four goals to one, while in the first round of the 3D simulation competition the biggest win was by SEU which put nine goals past OPU Hana 3D.