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!

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 look back at our week attending NeurIPS, hear about work localising illegal mining sites using machine learning and geospatial data, and discover how a group of agents can minimise their journey length whilst avoiding collisions. We were lucky enough to attend the thirty-eighth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024) which took place in Vancouver, Canada, from Tuesday 10 December to Sunday 15 December. On the first day of the event we held a session on science communication for AI researchers. It was great to see so many people there, and so many thoughtful questions following our presentation.

The RoboCup Federation has announced new partnerships with three robotics companies: Booster Robotics, Fourier Intelligence and Unitree Robotics. The RoboCup Federation, an international initiative, uses the RoboCup competition series and challenges as a platform to promote and advance robotics and AI research. This partnership will bring together the expertise of the RoboCup community, and the networking and commercialisation opportunities that the three companies offer. The aim is that the companies' humanoid robot hardware will be used in future RoboCup competitions. RoboCup's President, Ubbo Visser, said "The RoboCup Federation is very excited to be partnering with Booster Robotics, Fourier Intelligence, and Unitree Robotics towards our joint goal of improving the state of the art of intelligent robotics through cutting-edge research and world-class development. I firmly believe that our collaboration will enable us to achieve significantly faster and more impactful progress than any of us could achieve independently".

As I write this blob post, we're a few days away from the opening of the 2021 RoboCup Competitions and Symposium. Running from June 22nd-28th, this event brings together AI and robotics researchers and learners from around the world, for the first (and ideally last!) time in a fully remote format. The first official international RoboCup event occurred 25 years ago, at the IROS 1996 conference in Osaka, Japan. Called "pre-RoboCup" because the first full RoboCup was slated to launch the following year at the 1997 IJCAI conference in Nagoya, the CMUnited team created by myself and my Ph.D. advisor, Manuela Veloso, was the only non-Japanese entry in the simulation competition, which was the only event that year. While RoboCup has indisputably played a huge role in the last quarter-century of AI research, it has also played a leading role in my own personal story.

The experience gained during these competitions has increased the maturity level of the field, which allowed deploying robots after real disasters (for example, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster). This article provides an overview of these competitions and highlights the state of the art and the lessons learned. A major outcome of this initiative was the RoboCup Rescue competitions. In this article, we introduce the RoboCup Rescue leagues, namely the Rescue Robot League (RRL) and the Rescue Simulation League (RSL) (Tadokoro et al. 2000; Kitano and Tadokoro 2001). Disaster mitigation is an important social issue involving large numbers of heterogeneous agents acting in hostile environments.

RoboCup was created in 1996 by a group of Japanese, American, and European artificial intelligence and robotics researchers with a formidable, visionary long-term challenge: By 2050 a team of robot soccer players will beat the human World Cup champion team. In this article, we focus on RoboCup robot soccer, and present its five current leagues, which address complementary scientific challenges through different robot and physical setups. Full details on the status of the RoboCup soccer leagues, including league history and past results, upcoming competitions, and detailed rules and specifications are available from the league homepages and wikis.

The RoboCup Rescue Robot and Simulation competitions have been held since 2000. The experience gained during these competitions has increased the maturity level of the field, which allowed deploying robots after real disasters (for example, Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster). This article provides an overview of these competitions and highlights the state of the art and the lessons learned.