EAST RUTHERFORD, \u2060New Jersey, July 5 (Reuters) – The World Cup has seen superstars, \u2060pitch invaders, heartbreak and joy across its 96 years \u2014 and, \u200con Sunday, it got a robot.<\/p>\n
Atlas, an advanced humanoid robot, stepped pitchside to deliver the match ball to the referee at halftime at New York New Jersey Stadium, \u200bwhere Brazil were playing Norway in the \u2060round of 16. Its moves \u2060include imitating a few uncanny goal celebrations \u2014 including Norwegian striker Erling Haaland’s \u2060meditation \u200cpose.<\/p>\n
“We always looked at human skill as a way to like motivate us and challenge us to push forward what \u2060robots can do,” said Alberto Rodriguez, director of \u200brobot behavior at Boston \u200cDynamics.<\/p>\n
The robot, presented by tournament sponsor Hyundai Motor, has previously \u2060danced and \u200bengaged in parkour.<\/p>\n
But to deliver the match ball \u2014 and pull off a few sweet moves \u2014 Atlas had to navigate challenges unique to the World Cup.<\/p>\n
Standard \u2060Wi-Fi communications with Atlas were out of \u200bthe question, with tens of thousands of fans surrounding the pitch with cellphones, so a new communications channel was established with a radio device attached \u2060to the robot’s back.<\/p>\n
“And grass has its own peculiarity,” said Rodriguez. “We had to change the way that Atlas learns to walk and learns to jump and run so that it’s more robust.”<\/p>\n
Hyundai has been \u200baggressively pursuing mass production of the robots, announcing \u2060this year that it plans to deploy them at its U.S. manufacturing \u200bplant in Georgia starting in 2028, in \u200can effort to automate high-risk and \u200brepetitive tasks.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Amy Tennery in New York, additional reporting by Kurt Hall, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien and Ed Osmond)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EAST RUTHERFORD, \u2060New Jersey, July 5 (Reuters) – The World Cup has seen superstars, \u2060pitch invaders, heartbreak and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":781756,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,13201,596,85,21418],"class_list":["post-781755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-fifa","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-world-cup"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=781755"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781755\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/781756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=781755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=781755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=781755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}