The 2019 RoboCup International Symposium and World Championship is one of the world’s leading technology events. It will be held in Sydney after a successful bid by Business Events Sydney (BESydney) and partners including UNSW, RoboCupJunior Australia (a high school competition circuit) and Bastion Collective.

More than 2,000 researchers and innovators, and 600 teams from 50 nations will be in Sydney for RoboCup events that extend to search-and-rescue, caregiving assistance and other real-world scenarios.

The long term goal of the RoboCup competition is to field a fully autonomous team of humanoid robots by 2050, which would be able to defeat the World Cup-winning human squad in a match governed by FIFA’s official rules.

Maurice Pagnucco, Deputy Dean (Education) in Engineering and Head of the School of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW, likened the competition to the space race, in terms of its final outcome of pushing advances in technologies.

“What we learn from robots playing soccer or navigating a maze can be applied to industry and help us solve difficult real-world problems,” he said.

Lyn Lewis-Smith, CEO of BESydney, says RoboCup is developing the skills that will be needed for the jobs of the future.

“It’s testament to our own local talent that this leading event has chosen Sydney as its host,” she said.

NSW Chief Scientist and Engineer, Mary O'Kane, agreed.

“NSW is a leader in robotics research globally, particularly in large-scale field robotics and autonomous systems. The state also has considerable strength in artificial intelligence,” she said.

“Bringing RoboCup to Sydney will significantly boost the profile of robotics here. Perhaps more importantly, it will pique the interest of our children, their parents and teachers in the fields of maths and science."

The 2019 RoboCup will be held at International Convention Centre Sydney (ICC Sydney) with a number of events also held around the Darling Harbour foreshore.

RoboCup Soccer has five leagues, of which the most hotly contested is the Standard Platform League. In this lead, teams use identical robots, but run their own software. This means the AI which drives the robots, rather than the mechanics of the robots, is the main differentiator.

In this league, UNSW has won a record five world titles, including the last two back-to-back.

In all leagues, robots operate fully autonomously, with no remote control by either humans or computers during games.