Recently, a bunch of people got together to watch the RoboCup -- which is a collection of completely autonomous robots who are programmed to play soccer. Specifically, they're programmed to play soccer exceedingly badly. Or at least, that's the impression you'll get after watching the totally awesome video after the jump.
Via Reddit, here are the "highlights" of RoboCup -- which is sadly neither RoboCop, nor a really awesome robot cup that, like, drinks for you or something.
Based solely on the footage above, here are the things that these robots are the best at doing:
- Falling over
- Getting up (this is awesome)
- Kicking each other
Naturally, they're better at flopping than literally anything else, because this is the single most important thing in soccer. The only thing that RoboCup was missing was a little robot referee to come out and hold up a yellow card for whatever robot was standing closest to the robot that just fell over.
According to The Verge, Team DARwIn won the event for the second time (the name is ironic!). Paul Miller at The Verge also has a giant article about the maniacs at Virginia Tech who build some of these flesh-eating terrors that will surely destroy us all.*
While I don't think we'll be seeing any robot soccer teams playing in FIFA any time soon (ASIMOV WARNED US ABOUT THIS), I think we can all agree that these guys would make better baseball umpires than the ones we currently have.
* Speculation.
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