A global arena for intelligent machines

RoboCup is the world championship for robot football. Teams of fully autonomous robots – no joysticks, no remote control – play real matches against each other. RoboCup has a bold long‑term ambition: by around mid‑century, a robot team should be able to beat the human World Cup winners. In practice, RoboCup has become a large international laboratory for artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. Students, researchers and companies share software, datasets and insights, openly exchange methods, publish research and test new ideas under match pressure.

whIRLwind Amsterdam: UvA’s student robotics squad

Team whIRLwind Amsterdam consists of 15 Bachelor’s and Master’s students in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, supported by UvA staff. Half the team is present in Incheon, the rest supports the team from Amsterdam. The team competes in the Humanoid Soccer League’s middle‑size division, using Booster K1 robots: roughly 95‑centimetre‑tall humanoid machines weighing about 20 kilos, equipped with depth cameras (for 3D vision), motion sensors and an onboard computer comparable to a powerful laptop. They will compete against 18 teams from countries such as Germany, Ireland, Korea, Japan, China, Canada, and USA.

Training robot strikers with rewards

Almost all of the ‘football intelligence’ in these robots is learned rather than hard‑coded. The team relies heavily on reinforcement learning: an AI technique in which software improves by trial and error, receiving rewards for good actions and penalties for bad ones – similar to how a pet learns cetrain behaviour through rewards. In simulation, the robots practise walking, kicking, goalkeeping and searching for the ball millions of times before those skills are transferred to the real robot on the field.

Support Team whIRLwind

Support the students and watch their matches via the live stream on Twitch or Youtube.
Take a look at the schedule of the matches.