UCT sent the first RoboCup team from Africa to compete in the recent RoboCup World Cup, held in Suzhou, China.

The team of staff and students from the Robotics and Agents Research Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical Engineering were part of an international collaboration between RWTH Aachen University, Germany, and Graz University of Technology, Austria.

A total of 16 teams world-wide were chosen for the launch.

RoboCup is an international research and education initiative that fosters foster artificial intelligence and robotics research by providing a standard problem in which a wide range of technologies can be examined and integrated.

The concept of soccer-playing robots was first introduced in 1993. The ultimate goal of the RoboCup project is to develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human soccer world champions by 2050.

The UCT team and their international partners participated in the Standard Platform league, in which all teams use identical robots - the humanoid Aldebaran Nao - and the teams concentrate on software development.

These robots operate fully autonomously in other words there is no external control by people or by computers.