In the recently concluded 2025 RoboCup Humanoid Adult League, the human-like robot motion algorithm "HumanoidKick," jointly developed by ByteDance Seed Team and Professor Zhao Mingguo's team from Tsinghua University, helped the Tsinghua Huo Shen team win the championship. This victory is not only a glory for Huo Shen but also the first time a Chinese robot football team has won in this category, marking a significant advancement in China's robotics technology.
Since its first event in 1997, the RoboCup competition has been one of the highest-level and most influential international robotics events. The organizers aim to promote continuous development of robotics technology, enabling robots to make autonomous decisions and perform tasks in complex and changing environments.
This year's Humanoid Adult League competition was extremely challenging, with participating robots needing to simulate the height of an average adult and perform complex soccer techniques. In the group stage, the Tsinghua Huo Shen team performed excellently, advancing smoothly with scores of 6:3, 16:0, and 9:0, thanks to decentralized computing and real-time dynamic response. In the semi-finals, they won convincingly with a score of 12:0, and finally defeated their opponent 5:2 in the final to claim the championship.
The "HumanoidKick" algorithm was crucial to this victory, aiming to solve the challenges of real-time perception and action execution in robot football. This algorithm uses visual depth reinforcement learning to complete the entire process from "finding the ball" to "chasing the ball" and "kicking the ball," demonstrating strong adaptability and reaction speed. Compared to traditional methods, HumanoidKick can respond in real-time to changes on the field, make autonomous decisions, and optimize tactics, allowing robots to flexibly handle situations like human players.
The collaboration between the ByteDance Seed Team and Tsinghua University stems from a shared exploration of technology and practical applications. Both parties hope that this achievement will promote academic research and engineering practice in robotics technology, ultimately achieving broader applications.
This victory is not only a milestone for Tsinghua University and ByteDance Seed, but also laid an important foundation for China in the global robotics technology field. In the future, the ByteDance Seed Team will continue to focus on research in intelligent robot systems, attract more outstanding talents, and jointly explore the future of robotics technology.