 I think this is where robotics is happening for real. It's very different from a laboratory environment where you just point the camera on the robot and wait until it has worked and then you show that it worked one time. Here it has to work one time and it has to work in a dynamic environment where other robots are bumping into you and there's all kinds of disturbances, undefined light, things like that. The competition is made more difficult to get to see the real problems. It's not so easy to know what the purpose of RoboCup is. There used to be this original vision of winning against the human soccer players in the year 2050 and it was like a big go to the moon project of artificial intelligence research. The problem is that if the most competitive league is the kid's size where you're always less than a meter, less than a half a meter tall, it's not going to go anywhere very fast, right? So you need to actually upgrade to some of these larger size leagues. So we have the kid's size which is like half a meter tall and then we've got the teen size league which is starting to get more competitive and that's a meter tall. Adult size league which is just as tall as us and that one's still a little bit how do I walk around, how do I kick the ball without falling over. We have altogether 300 parameters of the software that is put out in a text file so you can have easy access to it. Plus there's a number which I don't even know hard coded in the code. Let's say there's 500 numbers which determine how well the robot plays and if you misadjust one of them it doesn't work. We start approximately two months before the competitions and then it gets more and more time intensive the closer we get to the first day. Here we didn't do as much of the iterative design because there's no machine shop. So a lot of the work was behind the scenes before RoboCup. Then we hear that's basically all we do. You get up in the morning, you come into the hall, you work and work and work on the robots and in the evening you go back to bed. I am dead tired of course when I get home. It's just that there's so many things spinning in my head. The whole program of the robots is basically loading in my brain when I sleep and trying to still find the errors and the bugs when I sleep. It's a pretty difficult challenge to get a robot to act like a human and how do it interact with the environment, the soccer ball, all the lighting conditions, how they vary. To be competitive with humans we need much more powerful robots and at the same time much more safe robots. You need to put a good deal of research in there before you can even think about doing artificial intelligence. You need to have a very strong mechanical platform. The general point of the At Home competition is to show that robots can do something in a home environment. The robots should be able to do something in a previously unknown environment. They have to manipulate objects, recognize objects of course and it's quite a complex problem. It combines a lot of different things. A lot of the things we learned from the soccer robots we applied in the home robots. So we started initially with the soccer robots and had the communication robot but then we carried over many of the insights to the At Home robots. It's about intelligence in machines and intelligence is about modeling the world and understanding the outcome of actions, of different types of actions. If you can make something that's very reliable, what you're doing is making sure that it doesn't trip over small disturbances. When it touches a robot it doesn't fall down. When it's walking in an environment it won't run into things, right? So you don't want a robot that's in a home or an office or a workspace that's constantly running into a refrigerator or a desk or something like that. You don't want something that is tripping while it's going up the stairs because there's a few papers lying around, something like that. And RoboCup, there are so many of these problems that we actually are addressing and putting into larger scale humanoids. It's all about reliability, it's all about stability and it's all about increasing the size and power of your robots. People ask me about 2050, that's ridiculous. You see like they have these tiny robots, they can now walk pretty well but they're really not very smart and they have trouble seeing the ball. You'll never be able to do it. I just tell them, well, that's probably what people would have said in 1903 when they saw the Wright brothers fly 300 meters in a kite basically. Fifty years later and Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in a jet plane. So that was an enormous improvement over 50 years and now we still have 38 years left and the speed of change is much faster than it was about 100 years ago. In robotics it's always about the robots and what they can do but I think it's also important to look at the people who are doing the research behind it, what their goals are, what they want to get out of their robots. For a lot of people it's just getting robots to work but for us it's also learning about the human for example, our biobiped approach, taking a deep look into human locomotion and how human muscle activation works and all these things because I think the evolution has shown us that the system humans are using is quite useful and working quite well so this is very important to me. Everybody here feels like they're making a contribution towards this kind of robot goal. It is driven by the enthusiasm of its participants and if you go through the different halls and the different leagues and to watch the different people, the different teams, they are very dedicated, they are enthusiastic. I think this is one of the most important issues that it is really driven by thousands of enthusiasts all over the world. I mean I think the biggest thing is that you don't want to forget the human power involved in this. A lot of times everybody is looking at the robots and in that robot there is a whole consortium of teams and people that go into making these robots. Robocop is basically a reality check or you could say a site where you can test these skills that we developed in lab in a more dynamic and unstructured environment. Ultimately they have to work here on the soccer field, that's what it's about.