AIhub coffee corner: Are humanoids the future of embodied AI? This month we ask whether humanoids are the future of robotics. How has the technology evolved recently, and what can we expect in the years to come? Joining the conversation this time are: Joydeep Biswas (University of Texas at Austin), Sanmay Das (Virginia Tech), Rina Dechter (University of California, Irvine), Ioannis Erripis (AIhub), Sabine Hauert (University of Bristol), Ella Scallan (AIhub), and Marija Slavkovik (University of Bergen). There have been huge advancements in humanoid robots over the past couple of years. Today's topic is particularly timely, as RoboCup 2026 recently took place. I thought it would be interesting to start with an overview of recent developments at RoboCup. This all started snowballing a couple of years ago, and we suddenly started to see this huge inflection on the capabilities. New humanoid robots were showing up at RoboCup that didn't fall down as much. Suddenly we were able to deploy robots without humans following them around. I want to highlight that this is not just one key technical innovation, it required the confluence of a wide number of things: much better hardware, significant advances in algorithms, and advances in how we train and learn. Once upon a time, humanoid robots required classical control. However, most modern humanoid robots are using learned controllers for walking.

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 chat to AI pioneer, Michael Littman, learn about time-series forecasting for clinical data, investigate evolutionary game theory for cybersecurity, and get the scoop on neuromorphic computing. In the latest interview in our series meeting AI pioneers, Michael Littman reflects on the evolution of reinforcement learning, the power of science communication, and how generative AI is changing the way we teach and learn. Mayra Elwes is a PhD student developing machine learning methods for clinical time-series data. She is working on practical strategies to evaluate methods in a more contextualised way and on improving existing domain adaptation methods specific to time-series forecasting.

Raphael Memmesheimer has been successfully competing in the RoboCup@Home league winning the RoboCup@Home competition five times. He and his colleagues won the best paper award at RoboCup 2026 for their work "Efficient Image Annotation via Semi-Supervised Object Segmentation with Label Propagation" . We caught up with Raphael to find out more about this research, his history with RoboCup, and the challenges of the @Home competition. Could you start by telling us how you got involved with RoboCup@Home? I've actually been involved in the @Home league since I was a student, and my first time going to a World Cup for @Home was in 2013.

This year, RoboCup will be held in Incheon, South Korea, from 2-6 July. The event will see teams take part in competitions, training sessions, and a symposium. It's an exciting time for RoboCup, as there have been some updates to the leagues and competition format . Most prominently, the soccer leagues will have a primary focus on humanoid robots. A workshop focused on sharing projects, experiences, and innovations in educational robotics.

This year, RoboCup will be held in Incheon, South Korea, from 2-6 July. The event will see teams take part in competitions, training sessions, and a symposium. It's an exciting time for RoboCup, as there have been some updates to the leagues and competition format . Most prominently, the soccer leagues will have a primary focus on humanoid robots. A workshop focused on sharing projects, experiences, and innovations in educational robotics.

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 delved into the history of RoboCup, learned about time series, studied multiplicity, and found out more about Theory of Mind. RoboCup is an international competition that promotes and advances robotics and AI through the challenges presented by its various leagues. We got the chance to sit down with Professor Manuela Veloso, one of RoboCup's founders, to find out more about how it all started, how the community has grown over the years, and the vision for the future. What we've learned from 25 years of automated science, and what the future holds We're excited to launch a new series, where we'll be speaking with leading researchers to explore the breakthroughs driving AI and the reality of the future promises, to give you an inside perspective on the headlines.

RoboCup is an international competition that promotes and advances robotics and AI through the challenges presented by its various leagues. We got the chance to sit down with Professor Manuela Veloso, one of RoboCup's founders, to find out more about how it all started, how the community has grown over the years, and the vision for the future. I think it would be very interesting to go right back to the beginning and hear how RoboCup got started. What was the initial idea, and how did it get set up? So we are talking about the mid-90s. In terms of the research in those days, it was the beginning of the internet and many AI and computer science researchers were focused on the internet, first on sophisticated search algorithms, on natural language understanding, on information retrieval, and then on software agents and machine learning applied to digital information. From what I recall, there was a smaller group of researchers who were interested in actual, physical robots, and in particular in AI and robotics.

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!

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.

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.