RoboCup 2025

What is RoboCup?

• The world’s largest robotics and AI competition,running since 1997
• Features leagues in the following areas:
• Soccer: Autonomous robots compete in five leagues using various platforms (humanoid, wheeled, simulated). They perceive, plan, and act in real time without remote control, cooperating in a fast-paced game environment.
• Rescue: Teams use remote-controlled to fully autonomous robots in simulated disaster scenarios. Challenges include navigation, object manipulation, and victim detection which mirrors real-world search-and-rescue missions.
• Home: Service robots tackle everyday household tasks in realistic, unstructured environments, demonstrating how they can assist people in daily life.
• Industrial: Focused on future smart factories, robots solve challenges in dynamic logistics and mobile manipulation which addresses open questions in industrial automation and flexible production.
• Long-term goal: develop autonomous humanoid robots capable of competing andwinning against the human soccer world champions in a fair game by 2050.
• In addition to research, RoboCup features an educational sector: In the RoboCupJunior leagues, school students up to the age of 19 compete against each other in soccer, rescue or stage performance categories

Why it matters:

• The intention of RoboCup is to promote robotics and AI research, by offering a publicly appealing, but formidable challenge.  One of the effective ways to promote science and engineering research is  to set a challenging long term goal.
• The current breakthroughs in humanoid robotics, vision and AI are built on decades of development. RoboCup has played an important role in this development by hosting the first games of autonomous soccer playing robots almost 30 years ago, which the first humanoids entering the tournament in 2002
• There is still a long way to go before the robot’s hardware and software is robust enough to truly excel in all scenarios – this is why the scientific exchange RoboCup fosters is so import

Where & when is the next event?

• 17 – 21 July 2025, Salvador, Brazil: 2025.robocup.org
• A live stream will be availableduring all competition days on
  • twitch.tv/robocupofficial
  • youtube.com/@RoboCupBrasil

RoboCup 2025 in numbers:

• Almost 250 teams competing, with 112 research teams participating in Major leagues, and 123 student teams competing in RoboCupJunior
• About 1500 total competitors from 37 different countries
• While Brazil as the hosting country has the highest number of participating teams this year, Germany, Japan, China, Mexico and the USA all send 15 or more teams to RoboCup as well
• Soccer is popular in Brazil, and so is technology – when Brazil hosted RoboCup last in 2014, more than 100,000 visitors joined to watch the games. This year, they expect even more –up to 150,000 spectators are anticipated by the local organizers

PhotoS / VideoS

• Last year’s RoboCup in Eindhoven, Netherlands:
  flickr.com/robocup2024
  
  
• RoboCup over the years:
  robocup.org/photos

Press releases
English Version | Portuguese Version

Media contact:
media@robocup.org
comunicacao@robocup.org.br 
+55 11 986864993 – Patricia Vergara