He Shoots. He Scores. He Falls Over.

Here in Chicago, at the moment, Lord Stanley's Cup is all the rage, but I just watched a bit of the Confederation Cup final in which Brazil let the soccer (football) world know it won't be ignored in World Cup 2014, by blowing out World Number 1 Spain. I then found out that RoboCup 2013 had just concluded in Eindhoven, Holland.

How did I miss that?

Well, it's not exactly a front-page news event, but you might be interested in some YouTube video of the games, and some of the imagery posted on its site.

The stated goal of the founding organization (robocup.org) is to build, by mid-21st century, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players and to win a soccer game, comply with the official rules of the FIFA, against the winner of the most recent World Cup.

Looks like they still have a ways to go: http://www.robocup-2013.org/germans-supreme-in-humanoid-teen-size-final/

Joe Feeley is editor in chief for Control Design and Industrial Networking. Email him at [email protected] or check out his Google+ profile.