A podium finish was the dream for the NUbots as they set off to compete at RoboCup International 2025 in Brazil, supported by team sponsors, 4Tel and 4AI Systems. The annual event promotes robotics and AI research, this year attracting around 1,500 competitors from 37 different countries.
The NUBots team of nine comprises robotics and engineering students from University of Newcastle, mentored by AI specialists from 4AI Systems. It was the final year of participation for four senior team members, who were more determined than ever to bring back a trophy.
Teams compete across various leagues, with the Humanoid Soccer League being one of the most grueling. We asked Liam Craft, Software Engineer at 4Tel and NUbots team member since 2020, to take us through the tournament playbook…
Drop-in Games
Here robots compete to seed in the round robins. Drop-in games are always chaotic, more so this year with the addition of new robots from China who sponsored two teams in our league. These robots have millions of dollars of R&D behind them and are more than twice as heavy as ours, which used to be the heaviest in the league. Every team’s robots suffered significant damage by clashing with the heavier robots. We weren’t feeling too hopeful that we’d get on the podium this year.
Round Robins
In between games we spent a lot of time repairing robots, tuning our walk, tweaking our path planning algorithm, and chasing some breaking bugs. Things were starting to look up. We won three matches against teams from Brazil and Mexico.
Quarter Finals
Our opponents played well but we were confident, as our robots were proving to be much more reliable. Our walk was more stable and the path planning was excellent, allowing us to reliably dribble the ball to the goal around obstacles without falling over once. We won 2-0 against another Brazilian team.
Semi Finals
These new robots from China were like bulldozers — twice our weight and without much obstacle detection. It was looking more like a game of rugby. Our robots played admirably and were able to defend a couple of times, but ultimately were outmatched by the robots who won by eight goals. Due to damage being inflicted on our robots, we opted not to field any in the second half to ensure they were all working for the finals.
Finals
We faced a capable team, also from China, but they appeared to have intermittent issues with localisation and motion, meaning their robots would often get lost or fall over. We scored in the middle of the second half, and our new path planning algorithm worked beautifully. From the kick-off, our robot Kevin expertly weaved the ball past two opponents to score. We crossed our fingers— all we had to do was defend the goal for another five minutes and third place was ours. The rest of the game was thankfully uneventful and we celebrated the first trophy for NUbots since 2011!
WATCH the NUbots competing at RoboCup International.
Read more about the University of Newcastle’s NUbots team.
Images courtesy of NUbots.
