West LA Times

UCLA engineers dominated at RoboCup 2024 from July 18–21 in Eindhoven, Netherlands, with a pair of humanoid ARTEMIS robots winning every game in the soccer tournament to secure the world championship.

Led by UCLA Samueli School of Engineering professor Dennis Hong, the team from the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory at UCLA (RoMeLa) entered two ARTEMIS robots developed by the lab in the international competition’s adult-size humanoid soccer league. ARTEMIS stands for Advanced Robotic Technology for Enhanced Mobility and Improved Stability and is an advanced humanoid robot with electrically driven actuators custom-designed to behave like biological muscles.

At the tournament, which began Thursday, the twin ARTEMIS competed against robots from HERoEHS of South Korea’s Hanyang University, NimbRo AdultSize from the University of Bonn in Germany, and TH-MOS Adult and Tsinghua Hephaestus from China’s Tsinghua University. The five teams’ robots faced off against each other in six rounds of 20-minute soccer matches following FIFA's standard game rules.

In the semifinals over the weekend, ARTEMIS prevailed 5-2 against last year’s runner-up, HERoEHS, and 6-1 against defending champion NimbRo AdultSize in the finals on Sunday.

“This is not just a soccer competition but a benchmarking test for humanoid robots, so this win demonstrated the capabilities and potential of ARTEMIS,” said Hong. “I am so proud of all of our students who made this happen and even more excited for the things to come.”

With this latest victory, RoMeLa UCLA is now a six-time RoboCup world champion. After its last championship win in 2015, the team decided not to compete in the tournament until last year in Bordeaux, France. While RoMeLa did not place among the top three then, it won first place at the 2023 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Conference on Humanoid Robots in Austin, Texas.

The road to RoMeLa’s dominance at RoboCup 2024 was not without challenges. During one of four drop-in games that did not count toward official tournament games, one of the two ARTEMIS robots tripped and fell, breaking both arms. Regardless, the armless robot went on to beat its opponent 3-0. In total, ARTEMIS scored 45 goals in six official matches.

RoboCup’s humanoid league aims to promote research toward scientific progress in hardware, perception, decision-making and execution processes of autonomous robots that can interact with humans acceptably. The ultimate goal: to develop robots that can beat human world champions by 2050.

Team RoMeLa UCLA may already be looking forward to its next challenge. Lab members often refer to ARTEMIS as “a robot that exceeds Messi in soccer.”

Along with Hong, the team comprises 12 graduate students, two undergraduates and a high school student from Geffen Academy at UCLA. RoMeLa has been developing humanoid and other robots for more than 20 years focusing on robot locomotion and manipulation, soft actuators platform design kinematics mechanisms and autonomous systems.

ARTEMIS was built as a general-purpose humanoid robot focusing on bipedal movement over uneven terrain. Standing 4 feet 8 inches tall and weighing 85 pounds it is capable of running jumping walking up to 2.1 meters per second able to remain steady even when shoved or pulled with force.

Research at RoMeLa is supported partly by nearly $500000 contributions from more than 320 donors including Bong-Jin Kim Bomi Sul Additional funding includes a grant from Office Naval Research.