The Genneper Parken in Eindhoven hosted the 2024 edition of RoboCUP, the most exciting event in the world of autonomous robots. The joint team from the Universities of Porto and Aveiro, FC Portugal, was crowned Robotic Simulated Football champion for the third time in this competition. The final against the German team MagmaOffenburg saw FC Portugal win 5-3, a result that underlines the quality of the highly effective and cohesive Portuguese team.
A team of finalists from the L:IACD – Degree in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, a joint course between the Faculties of Sciences (FCUP) and Engineering (FEUP) of the University of Porto, contributed to this victory. Tomás Azevedo and Francisco Gomes da Silva were present at this final of the 3D Simulation League – Humanoids.
Their victory at RoboCup 2024 is the result of Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methodologies used to train robotic agents, which are part of the themes covered at L:IACD. ML allows robots to learn and improve their performance based on data and previous experiences, while DRL focuses on teaching robots to make optimal decisions through interaction with the simulation environment.
In the context of the 3D Simulation League, these techniques were essential for developing agents capable of performing complex tasks such as team coordination, game strategy, advanced individual skills (such as shooting, sprinting and dribbling). The FC Portugal robots were trained to learn autonomously and optimise their behaviour on an ongoing basis, resulting in a winning team, which also won the Scientific Challenge (best innovative contribution to the progress of this league) and the ‘FatProxy’ Challenge (simulation of humanoids using high-level ‘move’ and ‘kick’ commands instead of direct control of the various degrees of freedom).
The team’s success is evidenced by the 30 international awards achieved and the publication of more than 100 scientific articles in indexed journals and conferences.
Brasil will be the next destination of RoboCUP which will bring the world’s competition enthusiasts to Salvador from 15 to 21 July 2025.
All the information at: https://2024.robocup.org/
Photo: Bart van Overbeeke