Germany's Four-Legged Soccer Champs

Keeping close to the sideline, the plastic, component-laden version of man's best friend from the University of Texas gave the soccer ball a good kick with its nose. But its aim was slightly off, and the ball bounced off the goal post, meaning victory for the opposing team from the University of Dortmund.

Doggy treats all around for the victorious computer canines! Well, er, better make that an extra few drops of oil for the moving parts.

The contest at the George Institute of Technology pit four Sony Aibos dog robots programmed by grad students from the University of Dortmund against four similar ones programmed by University of Texas doctoral candidates. No remote controls were allowed.

Bionic doggies

While normally the Sony dogs are designed to act like pets, when fed special programming they turn into canine athletes of a sort. They can search for the apple-sized soccer ball through cameras in their noses, chase it, silently communicate with other team members over a wireless network, and try to get the ball through the goal. One dog on each team acted as goalkeeper.

Although the players competed on a smaller-than-regulation-sized field, they were penalized for any pushing or obstruction. There were no reports of post-game hooliganism from participants, human or otherwise.

While the RoboCup is largely designed to provide a welcome respite to bleary-eyed computer science students and was not broadcast on ESPN, it does have real-world applications and aims to help in the development of software for robotics applications. Participants said they hope by 2050, there will be a robot soccer team good enough to play a human team.

That might even happen well before 2050, given the recent performance of Germany's own flesh-and-blood national team.