Human versus virtual robotics soccer: A technical analysis

Abstract

Soccer is a team sport in which the performances of all team members are important for the outcome of a match. Even though the analysis of game events can be used to measure the team's performance, their perception, especially during the match, is extremely difficult, even for the involved agents. Soccer has been used as a simulation environment in many studies, mainly in the area of robotics. The RoboCup is an international robotics competition with an ambitious goal: in 2050 a robotics team will be capable of defeating the human world champion at the time. In this context, we compared technical similarities between human and robotics soccer. Based on an off-line automatic event detection tool, game statistics for the finals of both human and robotics soccer tournaments were collected and compared using the Wilcoxon test. The results show that the most frequent event in both forms of soccer is successful passes. Analysing the two types of passes considered (successful and missed), we conclude that there are significant differences between the two forms (W = 2, P=0.000354), with human soccer presenting a higher percentage of successful passes (77.89% vs. 66.97%). Of restart events (W=0, P=0.00048965), the most frequent one, in both forms, is the throw-in (human 59.91%, robotics 66.4%), and the least frequent is the corner (human 13.7%, robotics 14.09%). Regarding the frequency of shots, in the robotics environment “shots” were the most predominant type (43.27%), whereas in human soccer “shots on target” predominated (71.25%; W=64, P=0.000085641). Finally, the number of faults is minor in robotics soccer.