Dennis Hong
Members of Team RoMeLa UCLA celebrate their RoboCup 2024 soccer championship win at the Indoor Sportcentrum Eindhoven in the Netherlands.
UCLA engineers dominated at RoboCup 2024 July 18–21 in Eindhoven, Netherlands, with a pair of humanoid ARTEMIS robots winning every game in the soccer tournament to snag the world championship.
Led by UCLA Samueli School of Engineering professor Dennis Hong, the team from the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory at UCLA — RoMeLa — entered two ARTEMIS robots developed by the lab in the international competition's adult-size humanoid soccer league. ARTEMIS, for Advanced Robotic Technology for Enhanced Mobility and Improved Stability, is an advanced humanoid robot with electrically driven actuators that were custom-designed to behave like biological muscles.
At the tournament, which kicked off Thursday, the twin ARTEMIS competed against robots from HERoEHS of South Korea's Hanyang University, NimbRo AdultSize from the University of Bonn in Germany, and TH-MOS Adult and Tsinghua Hephaestus from China's Tsinghua University. The five teams' robots faced off against each other in six rounds of 20-minute soccer matches following the standard game rules of FIFA, the international soccer governing body.
In the semifinals over the weekend, ARTEMIS prevailed 5-2 against last year's runner-up, HERoEHS, and 6-1 against defending champion NimbRo AdultSize in the finals on Sunday. (Watch the video below.)
"This is not just a soccer competition but a benchmarking test for humanoid robots, so this win demonstrated the capabilities and potential of ARTEMIS," said Hong, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the director of RoMeLa. "I am so proud of all of our students who made this happen and even more excited for the things to come."
With this latest victory, RoMeLa UCLA is now a six-time RoboCup world champion. After its last championship win in 2015, the team decided not to compete in the tournament until last year in Bordeaux, France. While RoMeLa did not place among the top three, it won first place in the 2023 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Conference on Humanoid Robots in Austin, Texas.
The road to RoMeLa's dominance at RoboCup 2024 was not without challenges. During one of the four drop-in games, which did not count toward the official six tournament games, one of the two ARTEMIS robots tripped and fell, breaking both arms. Regardless, the armless robot went on to beat its opponent 3-0. In total, ARTEMIS scored 45 goals in six official matches.
RoboCup's humanoid league aims to promote research toward scientific progress in hardware, perception, decision-making and execution processes of autonomous robots that can interact with humans in a socially acceptable way. The ultimate goal: to develop robots that can beat soccer's human world champions by 2050.
And Team RoMeLa UCLA may already be looking forward to its next challenge. Lab members often refer to ARTEMIS as "a robot that exceeds Messi in soccer."
Along with Hong, the team is composed of 12 graduate students, two undergraduates and a high school student from Geffen Academy at UCLA. RoMeLa has been developing humanoid and other robots for more than 20 years, focusing on robot locomotion and manipulation, soft actuators, platform design, kinematics and mechanisms, and autonomous systems.
ARTEMIS was built as a general-purpose humanoid robot with a focus on bipedal movement over uneven terrain. Standing 4 feet, 8 inches tall and weighing 85 pounds, it is capable of running, jumping and walking up to 2.1 meters per second, and is able to remain steady even when shoved or pulled with force.
Research at RoMeLa is supported in part by nearly $500,000 in contributions from more than 320 donors, including Bong-Jin Kim and Bomi Sul. Additional funding includes a grant from the Office of Naval Research.
