RoboCup 2026: 56 Humanoid Teams Hit the Pitch in Korea

RoboCup 2026 kicked off in Incheon, South Korea today with 56 teams from 45 countries competing across three humanoid soccer divisions — and a household robot league running alongside.

The world's most ambitious robotics competition opened its doors in South Korea today. RoboCup 2026 kicked off at the Songdo Convensia convention center in Incheon, with 56 teams from 45 countries putting their humanoid robots through the paces on the soccer pitch.

This year marks a milestone: for the first time, the soccer leagues are centered entirely on humanoid robots, split into three divisions by size. The small division fields 18 teams, the middle division 16, and the large division — where the bipedal machines stand chest-high to a human — draws an impressive 22 contenders.

The first two days use a Swiss-system seeding round to sort teams into knockout brackets. After day one, three teams in the small division have perfect six-point records: GeoHBots, CAU Mountain & Sea, and Hamburg Bit-Bots. In the middle division, B-Human, RoboRoos, and HTWK Robots also came through clean.

The soccer isn't the only show. Running alongside the pitch competitions is the @Home league, where AI machines demonstrate laundry folding, object retrieval, and other domestic tasks — the kind that might actually show up in your living room before a robot footballer does.

RoboCup's founding challenge remains on the wall: field a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can beat the human World Cup champions by 2050. The robots in Incheon still move at a careful shuffle, and goals are rare. But the pace has quickened noticeably since the last cup — the gap is closing, one servo at a time.

The competition runs through July 5, with livestreams available from the RoboCup humanoid league YouTube channel.

Sources: Robohub, MSN, MSN/AP