No joysticks. No remote control. Just robots that think for themselves.

Bipedal robots in three size divisions chase a real ball, fall, and pick themselves back up — no human touching a thing.

Goal

Win autonomous humanoid soccer under FIFA-style rules.

→ 2050

This is the 2050 challenge in miniature — the only league whose format is the goal itself.

Wow

July 2026 saw the first-ever 11-vs-11 humanoid match (B-Human 4–0 HTWK) — its motions trained by deep reinforcement learning, not hand-coded. It was an exhibition, on a pitch scaled for 95-cm robots.

Puck-sized wheeled robots guided by an overhead camera and an off-field 'brain,' moving faster than any human could react.

Goal

Coordinate a team of up to 11 robots (in the top division) with centralized vision and off-board planning.

→ 2050

It effectively solved high-speed multi-robot coordination — tactics that transfer to humanoids as they get faster.

Wow

The multi-robot coordination pioneered here didn't stay on the pitch — the architect of a four-time Small Size champion went on to co-found Kiva Systems, bought by Amazon for $775M in 2012 and now the backbone of Amazon Robotics.

Five knee-high robots control a regulation FIFA ball with only onboard sensors, on a 22×14 m pitch.

Goal

Outscore the opponent — and a pass is mandatory before a goal counts.

→ 2050

Self-described 'shortest route to FIFA-compliant robot soccer'; its passing and cooperation feed humanoid team tactics.

Wow

For years the tournament ended with the robot champion taking on a team of humans — the man-vs-machine tradition that's now evolving into humans vs humanoids.

No hardware at all — pure AI agents (2D circles or 3D humanoid avatars) play in real time.

Goal

Win in simulation with software agents alone.

→ 2050

The cheap testbed where multi-agent learning is prototyped before it ever touches real humanoids.

Wow

The 'grandmother of all RoboCup leagues' — its Soccer Server dates to 1994, and the 2D sim was deliberately frozen 2003–2008 so scientific progress could be measured year over year.

A tracked robot claws over rubble inside a mock collapsed building, hunting the heat and motion signatures of victims.

Goal

Find victims, map the site, and report hazards — autonomy earns up to 8× the points.

→ 2050

Where autonomous mobility, manipulation and mapping get stress-tested in the messy, non-soccer world a general-purpose humanoid must handle.

Wow

Not a fully-autonomous league — teleoperation is allowed and scored. Yet the impact is real: the NIST-designed arenas here became the ASTM International standards now used to test emergency-response robots — guiding $200M+ in robot purchases by responders and the military — and rescue tech pioneered in the league reached the 2011 Fukushima disaster.

A service robot navigates a furnished apartment, fetches a named object from a cluttered shelf, and hands it over — from a spoken request alone.

Goal

Complete household tasks fully autonomously across changing test rounds.

→ 2050

Where humanoids learn the non-soccer skills — perception, manipulation, natural conversation — that every 2050-era robot will need.

Wow

For years it ran as separate standard-platform tracks — every team on identical robots, so the contest was pure software — then unified into a single open league in 2025.

Mobile robots wheel between machines and shelves, picking parts and filling changing customer orders on a mock factory floor.

Goal

Run a flexible factory — planning, on-demand manufacturing, logistics and recycling.

→ 2050

Autonomous mobile manipulation and multi-robot coordination — the building blocks for humanoids in real industry. The league now welcomes humanoid entrants.

Wow

Formed in 2026 by merging RoboCup@Work (2016) and the Logistics League (2012) into one.

Student-built 2-vs-2 autonomous robots play two 10-minute halves under simplified rules.

Goal

Score goals with robots the students designed and coded themselves.

Robots follow a line or solve a maze to find and report victims, with entry tiers for newcomers.

Goal

Navigate a disaster course autonomously and rescue the 'victims.'

A one-to-two-minute choreographed robot performance — dance, theatre, music, art.

Goal

Move an audience with an autonomous performance the team designs.