Robot Football Is Getting Serious At Maker Faire Rome

RoboCup’s humanoids have played their first 11-a-side match. This October, some of the

same problems — balance, vision, autonomy and plenty of debugging — come to Maker

Faire Rome.

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This summer, twenty-two humanoid robots walked onto a football pitch in Incheon, South Korea. Eleven against eleven. No remote controls. On 5 July 2026, B-Human from Bremen and HTWK Robots from Leipzig played the first 11-a-side humanoid robot football match in RoboCup history. It was an exhibition played after the official competition, on a larger pitch, and lasted one half. B-Human won 4–0. The score was interesting. The fact that the match could be played at all was more interesting.

When RoboCup introduced its first humanoid competition in Fukuoka in 20