Robots as individuals in the humanoid league

Having the goal of winning against the human world champions in soccer in 2050 in mind, the Humanoid League is facing the challenges of having to increase field and robot size until the sizes of regular fields and regular players are reached in the year 2040. The next major step is foreseen for the year 2020, when minimum robot size will increase by 50%, the number of robots per team will increase and the field size will fourfold. All three aspects will have a crucial impact. For the organizers, it will become increasingly hard, if not impossible at some point, to make arrangements for up to six fields at the RoboCup venue. For the participants, sustaining a team of ever increasing robots, in size and numbers will be a similar challenge. We believe that the 2050 goal can only be achieved if a new scheme of competition of individual robots, playing with others, can be found. Then, teams could focus on a single robot. To encourage this, we propose to revise the competition scheme, moving away from participating with a team of robots to participating with a single robot, that preserves the competitive element of ranking performance of individual robots and awarding trophies. This paper is intended to spark a discussion of a rule change to encourage participation of single robots in the Humanoid League and still contribute to reaching the 2050 goal.