Banco do Brasil S.A. 2021

Robots, the next generation of soccer players

1____If you think a robot will steal your job, you are not

alone. Soccer players should be worried too. The next

Messi probably won’t be of flesh and blood but plastic

and metal.

2____The concept emerged during the conference

“Workshop on grand challenges in artificial

intelligence,” held in Tokyo in 1992, and independently,

in 1993, when Professor Alan Mackworth from

the University of Bristol in Canada described an

experiment with small soccer players in a scientific

article.

3____Over 40 teams already participated in the first

RoboCup tournament in 1997, and the competition is

held every year. The RoboCup Federation wants to

play and win a game against a real-world cup humans’

team by 2050.

4____The idea behind artificially intelligent players

is to investigate how robots perceive motion and

communicate with each other. Physical abilities like

walking, running, and kicking the ball while maintaining

balance are crucial to improving robots for other tasks

like rescue, home, industry, and education.

5____Designing robots for sports requires much more

than experts in state-of-the-art technology. Humans

and machines do not share the same skills. Engineers

need to impose limitations on soccer robots to imitate

soccer players as much as possible and ensure

following the game’s rules.

6____RoboCup Soccer Federation, the “FIFA” of robots,

which supports five leagues, imposes restrictions

on players’ design and rules of the game. Each has

its own robot design and game rules to give room

for different scientific goals. The number of players,

their size, the ball type, and the field dimensions are

different for each league.

7____In the humanoid league the players are human-

like robots with human-like senses. However, they are

rather slow. Many of the skills needed to fully recreate

actual soccer player movements are still in the early

stages of research.

8____The game becomes exciting for middle and small

size leagues. The models are much simpler; they

are just boxes with a cyclopean eye. Their design

focuses on team behavior: recognizing an opponent,

cooperating with team members, receiving and giving

a standard FIFA size ball.

9____Today, soccer robots are entirely autonomous.

They wireless “talk” to each other, make decisions

regarding strategy in real-time, replace an “injured”

player, and shoot goals. The only person in a

RoboCup game is the referee. The team coaches

are engineers in charge of training the RoboCups’

artificial intelligence for fair play: the robots don’t

smash against each other or pull their shirts.

10____The next RoboCup competition will soon be

played, virtually, with rules that will allow teams to

participate without establishing physical contact.

_{Available at:<https://www.ua-magazine.com/2021/05/12/robots-the--next-generation-of-soccer-players>. Retrieved on: July 4th, 2021. Adapted.}

According to the second paragraph, the concept of robotic soccer players emerged