RoboCup: 10 Years of Achievements and Future Challenges

Will we see autonomous humanoid robots that play (and win) soccer against the human soccer world champion in the year 2050? There are serious research questions that have to be tackled behind the scenes of a soccer game: perception, decision making, action selection, hardware design, materials, energy, and more. RoboCup is also about the nature of intelligence, and playing soccer acts as a performance measure of systems that contain artificial intelligence -- in much the same way chess has been used over the last century. This article outlines the current situation following 10 years of research with reference to the results of the 2006 World Championship in Bremen, Germany, and discusses future challenges.