Bold Hearts, the University of Hertfordshire‘s resident robot football team (which is also the UK’s oldest and most successful) travelled to Iran last week for their first RoboCup tournament of the year.
The RoboCup Iran Open is seen as the largest and toughest pre-world championship out of all the stages, but the Hertfordshire team managed to clinch the win, beating internationally renowned rivals while they were at it.
Once the team had secured their place in the finals, they went up against Iran’s own team Parand where they won 1-0.
The Bold Hearts team from the School of Computer Science has been competing in RoboCup since 2002, though initially they only competed in the 3D Soccer Simulation League. In 2013, the Bold Hearts team moved into the kid-size humanoid hardware league and have already had their first major breakthrough in 2014, with becoming runner-up in the World Championship in Brazil.
Founder of the Bold Hearts team, Dr Daniel Polani said: ‘This is a fantastic start to the pre-world championship competitions and it’s an incredible motivation boost for the team going into the next competitions of the championship and onto RoboCup 2016 in Leipzig. Hopefully the team will continue to see this success moving onwards through the competitions.’