Robots on the soccer field.
Now we are going to talk about football, but with humanoid robots of course and you were told that humanoid robots can be trained to play football and that in the future the goal is to see these machines competing against humans, Unitree, a Chinese robotics company, has just presented its newest functionality for its humanoid the G1.
Different from any robot you have ever seen, it runs, kicks, passes, crashes, falls, gets up and even makes strategic decisions during the game, this can be the first big step for the “robot Cup” a global competition that has an audacious goal, until 2050 a team of humanoid robots will be able to beat the human team that wins the world cup that year.
But what makes this humanoid so impressive.
Unitree has already stood out in the robot market with impressive machines such as the Go1 quadruped robot that imitates the movements of a robotic dog and the humanoid G1 itself that has been seen doing incredible things, now the company is focused on football and developing the G1-Comp to compete in professional matches between robots from now and in the future against humans.
Advanced motion control, maintains balance, calculates the force of the shot that can quickly move around the field and Latest Generation AI, its vision system detects the ball, rival players and adjusts its strategy in real time, total autonomy, unlike other robots, it does not need remote control to make decisions during the game and reinforcement learning system improves over time by training and simulations before entering the field.
The G1-Comp has a series of advances that make it an impressive athlete, a more fluid locomotion system, new Intel real sense d455 depth camera, integration with vision recognition and motion control APIs and refined shooting and passing capabilities. It is also trained in virtual environments using Nvidia's Isaac SIM and Deep Mind, simulating millions of scenarios before entering the field.
What is the Cup robot?
It is the largest robot soccer competition in the world, bringing together teams that will play real matches. Currently, the tournaments are divided into two categories: Kid size robots between 40 and 100 cm in height playing four-on-four matches and adult size robots measuring 100 to 200 millimeters competing in a one-on-one format.
China has already had other representatives in the competition such as the robots from Forier Robotics and Booster Robotics, now the great expectation is whether China and Unity will really participate in this year's competition with the G1 Comp, in chess humans are no longer a rival for robots, the time has come for football to compete at a high level.
Robots need dynamic walking to maintain balance while moving, advanced visual perception to detect players, the ball and the field, and autonomous strategy to decide the best plays without external intervention. The G1-Comp already demonstrates many of these capabilities and Unitree wants to take it further.
We are at the beginning of an era in which human robots can not only do manual work, but also entertain us, whether by playing soccer or in a real machine battle.
