A core objective of RoboCup is to promote and advance robotics and AI research through the challenges offered by its various leagues. The ultimate goal of the soccer competition is that, by 2050, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots will defeat the most recent winner of the FIFA World Cup. To bring this vision closer to reality, the RoboCup Federation has announced several changes to the leagues . We spoke with Alessandra Rossi, a trustee who has been involved in the humanoid soccer league for many years, to learn more. Could you start by introducing yourself and tell us how you've been involved in RoboCup throughout the years, because you've been involved in so many aspects of the competition!

The goal of RoboCup is to make research in the area of robotics measurable over time, and grow a community that works together to solve increasingly difficult challenges over the years. The most ambitious of these challenges it to be able to play against the human world champions in soccer in 2050. To better understand what members of the RoboCup community believes to be the state of the art and the main challenges in the next decade and towards the 2050 game, we developed a survey and distributed it to members of different experience level and background within the community. We present data from 39 responses. Results highlighted that locomotion, awareness and decision-making, and robustness of robots are among those considered of high importance for the community, while human-robot interaction and natural language processing and generation are rated of low in importance and difficulty.

Alessandra Rossi is Assistant Professor at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy. Her PhD thesis was part of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie ETN SECURE project at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK, and she is now a Visiting Lecturer and Researcher there. Her research interests include human-robot interaction, social robotics, explainable AI, multi-agent systems and user profiling. She is the team leader of RoboCup team Bold Hearts at the University of Hertfordshire, and Executive Committee member of the RoboCup Humanoid League.

Alessandra Rossi is a member of both the technical and organising committees for the RoboCup Humanoid League. We spoke to her about the Humanoid League Virtual Season, which concluded with the grand final of the virtual soccer competition, and a three day workshop. The Humanoid League Virtual Season (HLVS) has been driven by two main core motivations: firstly to allow teams to have support for continuous testing while making progresses and changes to their software, and secondly, to keep the teams connected throughout the year, thus strengthening the community and collaboration between teams. We wanted to let teams use the longer periods between games, and the continuous games throughout the year to test novel approaches, with less risk, and to aid their success in the overall tournament. In addition, this way, teams can thoroughly analyse the collected data between games, and make informed decisions on how to improve and implement their approaches for the following match.