No joysticks. No remote control. Just robots that think for themselves.

Bipedal robots in three size divisions chase a real ball, fall, and pick themselves back up — no human touching a thing.

Goal

Win autonomous humanoid soccer under FIFA-style rules.

→ 2050

This is the 2050 challenge in miniature — the only league whose format is the goal itself.

Wow

July 2026 saw the first-ever 11-vs-11 humanoid match (B-Human 4–0 HTWK) — its motions trained by deep reinforcement learning, not hand-coded. It was an exhibition, on a pitch scaled for 95-cm robots.

Puck-sized wheeled robots guided by an overhead camera and an off-field 'brain,' moving faster than any human could react.

Goal

Coordinate a team of up to 11 robots (in the top division) with centralized vision and off-board planning.

→ 2050

It effectively solved high-speed multi-robot coordination — tactics that transfer to humanoids as they get faster.

Wow

The multi-robot coordination pioneered here didn't stay on the pitch — the architect of a four-time Small Size champion went on to co-found Kiva Systems, bought by Amazon for $775M in 2012 and now the backbone of Amazon Robotics.

Five knee-high robots control a regulation FIFA ball with only onboard sensors, on a 22×14 m pitch.

Goal

Outscore the opponent — and a pass is mandatory before a goal counts.

→ 2050

Self-described 'shortest route to FIFA-compliant robot soccer'; its passing and cooperation feed humanoid team tactics.

Wow

For years the tournament ended with the robot champion taking on a team of humans — the man-vs-machine tradition that's now evolving into humans vs humanoids.

No hardware at all — pure AI agents (2D circles or 3D humanoid avatars) play in real time.

Goal

Win in simulation with software agents alone.

→ 2050

The cheap testbed where multi-agent learning is prototyped before it ever touches real humanoids.

Wow

The 'grandmother of all RoboCup leagues' — its Soccer Server dates to 1994, and the 2D sim was deliberately frozen 2003–2008 so scientific progress could be measured year over year.

A tracked robot claws over rubble inside a mock collapsed building, hunting the heat and motion signatures of victims.

Goal

Find victims, map the site, and report hazards — autonomy earns up to 8× the points.

→ 2050

Where autonomous mobility, manipulation and mapping get stress-tested in the messy, non-soccer world a general-purpose humanoid must handle.

Wow

Not a fully autonomous league — teleoperation is allowed and scored. Yet the impact is real: the NIST-designed arenas here became the ASTM International standards now used to test emergency-response robots — guiding $200M+ in robot purchases by responders and the military — and rescue tech pioneered in the league reached the 2011 Fukushima disaster.

A service robot navigates a furnished apartment, fetches a named object from a cluttered shelf, and hands it over — from a spoken request alone.

Goal

Complete household tasks fully autonomously across changing test rounds.

→ 2050

Where humanoids learn the non-soccer skills — perception, manipulation, natural conversation — that every 2050-era robot will need.

Wow

For years it ran as separate standard-platform tracks — every team on identical robots, so the contest was pure software — then unified into a single open league in 2025.

Mobile robots wheel between machines and shelves, picking parts and filling changing customer orders on a mock factory floor.

Goal

Run a flexible factory — planning, on-demand manufacturing, logistics and recycling.

→ 2050

Autonomous mobile manipulation and multi-robot coordination — the building blocks for humanoids in real industry. The league now welcomes humanoid entrants.

Wow

Formed in 2026 by merging RoboCup@Work (2016) and the Logistics League (2012) into one.

At the World Championship, student-built robots play 2-vs-2 over two 10-minute halves. No driver, no overhead camera, no off-board computer — every robot senses, decides and acts entirely on its own hardware.

• Vision 2-vs-2 The robot finds the ball with an onboard camera. That is real-time computer vision running on a moving platform, with the game strategy layered on top.
• Infrared 2-vs-2 The same game solved through a different sense: the ball emits an infrared signal, so the robot works from signal direction and strength instead of pixels. The ball itself is open source — any team can build one.
• Entry 1-vs-1 One robot a side. Run at regional and super-regional tournaments — not at the World Championship — as the on-ramp before a team steps up to two robots.

Hard part

A soccer field is close to symmetrical, so seeing the ball is not enough — the robot still has to work out which goal is which. Perception, orientation, then a decision to strike or defend, in a game that never pauses, on electronics the students assembled themselves.

Three escalating takes on the same problem: get an autonomous robot through terrain it has never seen and find the victims.

• Rescue Line The robot tracks a line through gaps, ramps, seesaws and debris — then has to pick the victims up and carry them out. That turns a navigation problem into a manipulation one, on objects deliberately weighted to roll unpredictably. The live victims are reflective silver and the dead ones black, so the robot has to classify each sphere before it decides where to deliver it — and rescuing them in the right order multiplies the score.
• Rescue Maze An unknown labyrinth, scored on how much of it you explore rather than how fast you get through. The robot reads small markers on the walls to identify victims — computer vision from a moving platform, on symbols that may be rotated or poorly lit — while building a map as it goes — and then finding its way back to the start, because the exit bonus only pays out if it can.
• Rescue Simulation The same mapping problem in Erebus, the league's Webots-based simulator: a virtual robot explores the maze and identifies victims, with no hardware budget standing between a student and the algorithm.

Hard part

The course is unseen until the run begins. Building a map of somewhere you have never been while tracking your own position in it, recognizing what you are looking at, and remembering where you have been — that is mapping, localization and computer vision, the same problem class the Major leagues attack with far bigger budgets.

A choreographed robot performance of at least ninety seconds — dance, theater, music, art — judged on creativity as much as on engineering. The autonomy requirement does not relax because it is a stage.

• One open division Dance and Dance Theatre merged in 2015, and sub-leagues were dropped entirely in 2021. Under the current rules, a performance can be a magic show, a theater piece, storytelling, a comedy show or an art installation.

Hard part

Live, in front of judges. A team gets two attempts and can call a restart mid-performance — but a restart resets the score to zero and costs penalty marks, so the whole incentive is to land it first time. Then they sit a technical interview and explain how it actually works.