RoboCup: Iran’s Chance to Shine

What is the perfect way to combine a country’s love for football and its commitment to technological innovation? The RoboCup World Championship, which will take place between July 19 and July 23 in Hefei, China.

Iran is one of many countries to participate in the RoboCup World Championship, an international competition that tests participant countries’ artificial intelligence (AI) achievements run by the RoboCup Federation. There are a number of smaller competitions that lead up to the annual championship, including the RoboCup Open, which is also run on an annual basis by countries including Iran, Germany and the United States, and licensed by the federation. The RoboCup Iran Open usually takes place at the Tehran International Fair a week after Nowruz, the Iranian New Year, but this year it was held between April 8 and 10.

The RoboCup competitions, which take place around the world, pit robots against one another to determine which teams are the best in terms of ability and technological innovation.

“By the middle of the 21st century, a team of fully autonomous robot soccer players will win a soccer game, while complying with official FIFA rules,” declares the official RoboCup website. 

The competitions attract international interest because of the popularity of soccer around the globe, but it also has a clear educational and social mandate. Its RoboRescue project explores how robotics can improve search and rescue operations, and RoboJunior focuses specifically on educating children about AI’s role in delivering these vital services. RoboCup and Open RoboCup competitions also encourage education and engagement with school children.

The Robot World Cup Initiative is driven primarily by goals of scientific research and education, and gives the public an incentive to get involved by making it fun. Plans for the winning robot team to play the winners of the human World Cup are underway.

RoboCup rules change slightly every year to encourage advances in technology, artificial intelligence and robotics. In the process, it brings robot soccer players closer to real-life equivalents.

Morteza Musakhani, organizer of the Open RoboCup Iran, explains that competitions help boost innovation in software and hardware; these developments can then in turn be applied to other industries. In April, Iranian AI enthusiasts, entrepreneurs and innovators took part in the competition in Tehran.

According to the tournament’s official report, 730 teams registered to compete but only 345 of them qualified. Of these, 309 were teams from Iranian universities and 36 from other countries, including the Netherlands, Switzerland, Canada, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, Germany, China, Mexico, the United States, India, Thailand, Egypt, Belgium, and Colombia. The report also revealed that among the people taking part in developing and designing robot technologies, three quarters were male and a quarter female.

“We attended the Iran RoboCup to know who we’d be competing with at the World championship in 2015, which is in July in China,” said Niles, a member of the Hamburg Small Size Soccer Robot team. “And, actually, we found out that the Mechatronics Research Laboratories team from Qazvin University in Iran and the Berlin University team are very good. We spotted our weaknesses, and we’ll work on them before this year’s RoboCup.”

Haleh, who is part of the Qazvin Islamic Azad university robot squad, was happy with her team’s performance at the Iran Open competition.

“Our team does well compared to other international teams, and we proved that at the Open,” she says. “We came in third place at last year’s World RoboCup competition in the Netherlands, but I think we’ll be in better shape this year in China.”

Although Iran does not rank top among countries for robotic and artificial intelligence, the RoboCup competitions are evidence that certain Iranian teams are good enough not only to compete with foreign robotic teams but to beat them as well.

“Our team has competed at the Iran RoboCup four times already. We like to compete with Iranian teams because they’re good competition,” says Benjamin, head of the German robotics team. “We (Germany) have invested in robotic science and the government promotes it both in academia and across different industries.”

“The competitions in Iran followed the rules and standards of the 2015 World RoboCup tournament, which was recently released by the Robocup Federation,” says Musakhani. “Robots and robotic science have improved dramatically. The improvement is obvious and that’s evident at annual competitions. That’s why the federation modifies the rules and standards every year.”

Musakhani believes that bettering robotics will eventually improve overall quality of life for human beings around the world.

The 2015 RoboCup competition covers a range of areas of robotic and intelligence science, including rescue robots, house and worker robots, minesweeper and aerial ones, and robots that go underwater.

“Nowadays, robots are used across numerous industries and factories and some even make it into space. But they’re still not being used at home and in our daily lives,” says Anton, a member of the robotics team for Holland. “In my opinion, robotic science improves with every day and so we’ll have them in our homes in the near future.”

Timon, leader of the German robotics team, says robots are used in different industries in Germany. ”I don’t see the advantage of robots in my personal life. But some hospitals use robots for operations and to help disabled people.”

The RoboCup offers an opportunity to fuel enthusiasm to build and create intelligent robots capable of much more than human beings. If this is a success, it could be that one day robots join human society and increase our quality of life by making our lives easier and more comfortable. Iran has the ability to be at the forefront of this.  

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