RoboCup is an international scientific initiative with the goal of advancing the state of the art of intelligent robots, AI and automation. The annual RoboCup event took place from 15-21 July in Salvador, Brazil. The Logistics League forms part of the Industrial League and is an application-driven league inspired by the industrial scenario of a smart factory. Ahead of the Brazil meeting, we spoke with three key members of the league to find out more. Alexander Ferrein is a RoboCup Trustee overseeing the Industrial League, and Till Hofmann and Wataru Uemura are Logistics League Executive Committee members.

This is the focus of work by and, which won the best paper award at the recent RoboCup symposium . The symposium takes place alongside the annual RoboCup competition, which this year was held in Salvador, Brazil. We caught up with some of the authors to find out more about the work, how their method can be transferred to applications beyond RoboCup, and their future plans for the competition. Could you start by giving us a brief description of the problem that you were trying to solve in your paper "Self-supervised Feature Extraction for Enhanced Ball Detection on Soccer Robots"? The main challenge we faced was that deep learning generally requires a large amount of labeled data. This is not a major problem for common tasks that have already been studied, because you can usually find labeled datasets online.

In the critical 72 hours after an earthquake or explosion, a race against the clock begins to find survivors. When a powerful earthquake hit central Italy on 24 August 2016, killing 299 people, over 5 000 emergency workers were mobilised in search and rescue efforts that saved dozens from the rubble in the immediate aftermath. The pressure to move fast can create risks for first responders, who often face unstable environments with little information about the dangers ahead. But this type of rescue work could soon become safer and more efficient thanks to a joint effort by EU and Japanese researchers. Rescue organisations, research institutes and companies from both Europe and Japan worked together from 2019 to 2023 to develop a new generation of tools blending robotics, drone technology and chemical sensing to transform how emergency teams operate in disaster zones.

Weather forecasting plays a crucial role in supporting strategic decisions across various sectors, including agriculture, renewable energy production, and disaster management. However, the inherently dynamic and chaotic behavior of the atmosphere presents significant challenges to conventional predictive models. On the other hand, introducing quantum computing simulation techniques to the forecasting problems constitutes a promising alternative to overcome these challenges. In this context, this work explores the emerging intersection between quantum machine learning (QML) and climate forecasting. We present the implementation of a Quantum Neural Network (QNN) trained on real meteorological data from NASA's Prediction of Worldwide Energy Resources (POWER) database. The results show that QNN has the potential to outperform a classical Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) in terms of accuracy and adaptability to abrupt data shifts, particularly in wind speed prediction. Despite observed nonlinearities and architectural sensitivities, the QNN demonstrated robustness in handling temporal variability and faster convergence in temperature prediction. These findings highlight the potential of quantum models in short and medium term climate prediction, while also revealing key challenges and future directions for optimization and broader applicability.

Welcome to our monthly digest, where you can catch up with any AIhub stories you may have missed, peruse the latest news, recap recent events, and more. This month, we dive into the world of agents, learn about responsible multimodal AI, apply generative AI to computer networks, and dig into the RoboCup@Work League. This month, Sanmay Das, Tom Dietterich, Sabine Hauert, Sarit Kraus, and Michael Littman tackled the topic of agentic AI, discussing recent developments, and lessons learned from the decades of research in the autonomous agents and multiagent systems community. The 34th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI2025) took place in Montréal from 16-22 August, with a satellite event currently being held (from 29-31 August) in Guangzhou, China. You can find out more about the programmes of both venues here, and get a flavour of what attendees got up to in our social media round-ups: Part one Part two.

RoboCup is an international scientific initiative with the goal of advancing the state of the art of intelligent robots, AI and automation. The annual RoboCup event, where teams gather from across the globe to take part in competitions across a number of leagues, this year took place in Salvador, Brazil from 15-21 July. In a series of interviews, we've been meeting some of the RoboCup trustees, committee members, and participants, to find out more about their respective leagues. Christoph Steup is an Executive Committee member and oversees the @Work League. Ahead of the event in Brazil, we spoke to Christoph to find out more about the @Work League, the tasks that teams need to complete, and future plans for the League.

Welcome to our monthly digest, where you can catch up with any AIhub stories you may have missed, peruse the latest news, recap recent events, and more. This month, we take a trip around some of the RoboCup leagues, check in at ICML, learn about the NASA onboard AI research platform, and explore feedback in human-robot interactions. This month saw the running of RoboCup 2025, with the event taking place in Salvador, Brazil, from 15-21 July. Ahead of kick-off, we spoke to the general chair Marco Simões and caught up with Ana Patrícia Magalhães, lead organizer for RoboCupJunior, to find out more about their plans for the week. You can find out what the participants got up to in our two round-ups from social media: #RoboCup2025: social media round-up 1 #RoboCup2025: social media round-up part 2. If you missed the action, you can find the recordings of the livestreams here.

RoboCup2025 took place from 15-21 July in Salvador, Brazil. The event saw around 3000 participants competing in the various leagues. In our first social media round-up post we saw what the teams got up to during the first couple of days of the event. In this second post, we take a look at the action from the final days when the competitions reached their climax. In the #RoboCup2025 @Home OPL Final, our robot performed very well.

RoboCup2025 took place from 15-21 July in Salvador, Brazil. The event saw around 3000 participants competing in the various leagues. In our first social media round-up post we saw what the teams got up to during the first couple of days of the event. In this second post, we take a look at the action from the final days when the competitions reached their climax. In the #RoboCup2025 @Home OPL Final, our robot performed very well.

RoboCup2025 is currently taking place in Salvador, Brazil. With day one of the main competition complete, things are hotting up across the many different leagues. From soccer to rescue, from industrial to home scenarios, teams are putting their robots through their paces across a variety of tasks and matches. If you would like to catch up on the action from the first day, you can watch the recording of the livestream below. This includes coverage of the teams competing, interviews with participants and organisers, and insights into RoboCup and the various leagues.