Zhejiang University wins its 4th world's robot soccer championship

Zhejiang University was crowned robot soccer champion of the world recently, after defeating the German team ER-Force 1-0 in Sydney at RoboCup 2019-an international competition showcasing cutting-edge robotics technology. This is the fourth time that the university has claimed the top prize, team leader Huang Zheyuan told Xinhua after the match, adding that the victory was the result of the team's hard work.

"Another important reason for our victory is the inheritance of codes, decisions and experience from our predecessors," he said.

"Although we have a lot of experience, we still had to prepare well to face so many strong competitors here. I feel excited to have won the championship again," he said.

The event, first held in Japan in 1997, began with just one robot soccer category. Now the tournament features numerous divisions for both wheeled and legged robots that come in a range of different sizes.

The competition, which attracted over 2,000 participants from more than 40 countries this year, also hosted events for rescue robots, bomb detecting robots, social robots and medical robots.

While some robot soccer participants competed in categories that only involved programming the software for the robots, the Zhejiang University team also designed and built their hardware from scratch.

An extremely complex and challenging task, the process required a great deal of coordination between electrical and mechanical engineers, designers and computer coding specialists.

Speaking about their preparations, Huang said: "We had 11 team members here in Sydney, but we also had several team members back in China.

"The robots were all designed by us, from the machinery and the electric circuits down to the software and the calculations."

While robot soccer may appear as though it is all fun and games, the technology involved is serious business, with the breakthroughs made in these competitions likely to go on and inform many areas of the robotics industry.

As complex movements still represent a major challenge in almost every field of robotics, students who compete in robot soccer are well-placed to help design surgical robots, rescue robots, domestic robots and the driverless vehicles of the future.

In other categories of RoboCup 2019, Tsinghua University won third place in the humanoid adult-size division; the Beijing Information Science and Technology University secured second place in the mid-size league and Zhejiang University also took home second place in the humanoid kid-size category.