The NAO League
(Standard Platform League)
RoboCup is an international robotics competition founded in 1997. Its purpose is to use the RoboCup as a vehicle to promote robotics and artificial intelligence research by offering a formidable challenge that appeals to the general public.
The research goals involve cooperative multi-robot and multi-agent systems in dynamic adversarial environments.
The games also serve as a great opportunity to promote research in artificial intelligence and science and technology education.
The ultimate goal of the competition is to achieve, by the mid-21st century, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players able to win a soccer game, complying with official FIFA rules, against the winner of the most recent World Cup.
The RoboCup Federation has four major competition domains:
Each of them includes a number of leagues and subleagues. The most famous is the NAO Standard Platform League.
Since the 2008 edition in Suzhou, China, all teams use identical NAO robots in this league.
Thanks to NAO capabilities and power, the teams can focus solely on software development while using a state-of-the-art robot.
In 2008, the league replaced the highly successful Four-Legged League, based on Sony’s AIBO dog robots. In the last 2011 edition in Istanbul, 28 teams from 19 countries participated in the competition. In 2012, the competition will be held in Mexico City.
In 2010, the RoboCup Federation renewed its confidence in Aldebaran, extending our partnership agreement until 2013.
Regional competitions are also organized to allow non-qualified teams to join the NAO Standard Platform League to participate and become familiar with the competition:
