After successfully holding the FIFA World Cup 2014, Brazil is now all set to conduct another international football championship; this time for robots.

A team of seven Pakistani students from Centre of Advanced Studies in Engineering (Case) Islamabad will leave for Brazil on Friday, to participate in the international robotics competitions, also known as RoboCup. The event will take place in Joao Pessoa city from July 19 to 25.

Brazilian embassy issued a press release announcing the participation of these seven students in the competition. It said that the around 3,000 students, representing 45 countries, will take part in the competition.

Embassy spokesman said that the competition held its inaugural championship in Nagoya, Japan in 1997. Since then, it is conducted in a different country each year.

The press release said that the objective of the competition is to promote robotics and artificial intelligence research, by offering a publicly appealing, but formidably challenge. The competition has three categories; standard platform, with 32 inches high robots, with similarities to human beings; middle-size league, with 20 inches high robots; and the small-size league, with robots up to 6 inches in height.

The Pakistani delegation will compete in the middle-size league.

The official goal of the project is to have a fully autonomous team of humanoid robot football players by 2050 that can challenge the winners of FIFA World Cup while complying with official FIFA rules.

The organisers recognise that this goal is ambitious, but they remind that a robot has already won a competition against the best chess player in the world.

Published in Dawn, July 18th, 2014