Fully autonomous soccer robots gear up for Beijing showdown in futuristic finale

The RoBoLeague World Robot Soccer League will hold its final competition in Beijing on Saturday, showcasing autonomous humanoid robots in a cutting-edge event that merges artificial intelligence with the thrill of competitive sports.

As the first test competition for the upcoming inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games, the 3-on-3 humanoid robot football match will take place in the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area, widely known as the Yizhuang Development Zone.

Following rounds of fierce qualifying games, four Chinese teams of humanoid robot footballers have been selected to take part in the finals on Saturday evening.

On Thursday, teams from Tsinghua University and Beijing Information Science and Technology University hit the pitch to demonstrate their robot players' football prowess during a pre-competition training session.

The finals' rules stipulated that each team consist of three players and one substitute, with each match comprising two 10-minute halves and a 5-minute break.

The matchup unfolded without any help from human controllers, as the two-legged robot players accurately kicked, ran after, moved around, and jostled for the ball, despite their slightly wobbly movement.

"The World Robot Soccer League will be the first test competition for the 2025 World Humanoid Robot Games and China's first-ever 3-versus-3 AI humanoid robot football match as well, which will put the participating robots' endurance and agility to the test," Dou Jing, an organizer for the RoBoLeagueWorld Robot Soccer League, told China Central Television (CCTV) in an interview Thursday.

According to Wang Yonghao, who is in charge of the operations of Saturday's competition, said the robots are equipped with sensors that enable them to nimbly maneuver on the pitch and the rules have specified the use of colors to minimize disturbance for the competition.

"At present, all the visual recognition and positioning abilities of the robot are accomplished through optical cameras. For instance, during the football match, it needs to first identify a white, round ball, or an object of a similar size. Then we make sure that the color white or any other similar color will not appear on the robots' feet, on the body of the on-site staff and referees, including their shoes or other objects on them," he told CCTV.

The fully autonomous soccer bots have been trained with deep reinforcement learning, which gives them humanlike agility and enables them to better sense and react to their surroundings, without the need for human control.

"The robot should be able to see the football nearly 20 meters away at an accuracy rate of over 90 percent. First, it should be able to tell what or where the ball, the goal, or the pitch is, and afterward it needs to make decisions about the role it is going to play based on all these inputs. The following step would be to kick the ball and try to score a goal. All these are the technological challenges we aim to address at the moment. Of course, as the technology evolves, all these capabilities can be achieved for the robot now," said Cheng Hao, founder and CEO of Beijing-based Booster Robotics.

Beijing will host the 2025 World Humanoid Robot Games from Aug 15 to 17, as part of the larger World Robot Conference. It will be the first global sporting event dedicated solely to humanoid robots.

Fully autonomous soccer robots gear up for Beijing showdown in futuristic finale

The China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) helps to set a solid foundation for developing countries without complete infrastructure networks to pursue development independently, said Guinean Prime Minister Amadou Oury Bah in an interview on Wednesday.

Bah visited China and attended the World Economic Forum (WEF)'s 17th Annual Meeting of the New Champions, which concluded on Thursday in the northeastern city of Dalian.

Speaking to the China Global Television Network (CGTN) on the sideline of the meeting, Bah said "The BRI helps Guinea pursue great development. My visit to China aims to further deepen bilateral ties and to fully seize new development opportunities so that Guinea will achieve greater progress and connect more closely with the rest of the world, especially in terms of the construction of logistics and transport corridors, which will help Guinea and some regions in Africa to pursue true economic transformation."

Bah said at a sub-forum of the event held on Tuesday that he was looking forward to closer cooperation with China to help Guinea and other countries in Africa to pursue greater development.

He further explained the point in Wednesday's interview that he believes by working with China within the framework of BRI, some developing countries will pursue independent development by building a complete infrastructure network.

"We are all sovereign states. The BRI offers a solution to a key issue that the international community has been debating extensively over the past two decades -- how to eradicate poverty in some countries, African countries in particular. The solution offered by the BRI is practical and viable, because it meets the real needs of the developing countries. It helps countries without a complete infrastructure network to build logistics hubs, highways, ports and other facilities, thus laying a solid foundation for them to pursue independent development. These infrastructure networks constitute an essential prerequisite for development and only with these facilities can a country fully unleash the potential of its mineral and agricultural resources as well as its capacity to trade with all countries across the world," said Bah.

The prime minister also stressed the urgent need for African countries to foster their internal growth drivers in pursuing greater economic development.

"It has become an urgent task for African countries to achieve deep processing of resources domestically, because we need to foster internal growth drivers, pursue greater development and achieve more equitable distribution of wealth," said Bah.

BRI helps countries without complete infrastructure networks pursue independent development: Guinean PM