The University of Texas Longhorns may currently have a 3-4 record, but a much lesser known branch of UT Athletics had a big win recently.
Watch:
OK, so maybe the robots playing soccer who just won the RoboCup challenge won’t be building up huge fanbases or getting Gatorade dumped on them anytime soon (or at least let’s hope not), but the UT team managed to take home the win.
The RoboCup challenge, held in Beijing this year, is an annual event that has been taking place since 1997. Electronics Weekly notes that:
The aspiration of RoboCup is that: “By the middle of the 21st century, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players shall win a soccer game, complying with the official rules of FIFA, against the winner of the most recent World Cup.”
Learn more about how the robots communicate and strategize to earn a W in this quick video:
The robots are about as graceful as you’d expect. There were definitely a few awkward, flailing moments, but they managed to get the ball to the net enough times to outscore their New South Wales opponents, beating them 7-3.
As awkward as they were, the robots of team Austin Villa still managed to walk away with the win and make Longhorns proud. And at least they managed to not look like this the entire time:
Need more hilarious robot falls in your life? Here are a bunch of dives from preliminary RoboCup rounds earlier this year. Be sure to watch with the volume on — the announcers are as funny as the robots.
Featured image, screenshot from YouTube
