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A football match is played between two teams of robots, one under remote control by people, the other under autonomous computer control. For computer control, complex situations must be simplified; for example the robots ‘see’ by looking at the edges between distinct colours and positions are tracked through co-ordinates. The computer program is highly complex but made up of a number of functions, such as one that uses if/ then selection to determine the robot’s movement.

An alternative approach for the iCub robot is to program the robot to learn in a way that may be similar to how people learn. Speech recognition and image processing allows this robot to recognise, name and distinguish between simple objects. It seems likely that robots that learn in this way, will continue to improve their capabilities.