THU Robotics Claims Championship in China's First Fully Autonomous AI Robot Football Tournament

The conclusion of the ROBO League robot football tournament took place on Saturday in Beijing, where the THU Robotics team, representing Tsinghua University, triumphed over the Mountain Sea team from China Agricultural University with a score of 5:3. This competition was groundbreaking, as it was not only China's first fully autonomous 3v3 AI robot football match but also served as a preliminary event for the 2025 World Humanoid Robot Sports Games.

During the tournament, Dou Jing, who is the executive director of the organizing committee, highlighted that this match showcased a remarkable blend of technological innovation and real-world industrial application, emphasizing the ongoing integration of robots into everyday life. However, the event also revealed some of the limitations robots face, particularly concerning dynamic obstacle avoidance, which resulted in numerous collisions throughout the matches. To accommodate these challenges, the organizers implemented a more lenient set of rules allowing for certain non-malicious collisions to go unpunished, a decision intended to maintain a balance between competitive spirit, audience engagement, and engineering constraints.

all robots operated solely on AI-driven strategies without human input, and the introduction of an optimized penalty and refereeing system that minimized game interruptions. Cheng explained that football was chosen as the competition format to encourage students to apply their algorithms practically and to demonstrate robotic capabilities in autonomous mobility, collision resilience, and higher levels of intelligence.

Looking toward the future, Bian Yuansong from the co-organizing group indicated plans to develop additional robotics competitions, including humanoid robot half-marathons, to facilitate the widespread adoption of humanoid robot technology. Current performance levels of the robots are comparable to that of five- to six-year-old children, scoring approximately one to two points per game, yet advancements in robot functionality and autonomy have progressed rapidly.

Cheng emphasized the evolution of robot competitions, marking a shift from past events that required human safety assistants and faced frequent malfunctions. With advancements, robots can now autonomously navigate confrontations, achieve speeds of a meter per second, and even recover independently from falls. Looking ahead, there is hope for exponential growth in robot capabilities, surpassing youth-level teams, and ultimately challenging adult teams in future competitions.