Football league of invisible players

Fans will have to use a microscope to watch this game: tiny robots will drag a ball no larger than a human hair on a stadium that can fit into a grain of rice. .

Last week, a series of new robots debuted during the RoboCup 2007 competition in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Five teams competed in this competition: two teams from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, the rest are teams from the US Naval Academy in Maryland, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Simon Fraser University in Canada. .

Nanomaterials (billionths of a meter) will play on a tiny silicon " ball " that is attached to the electrodes, so that " players " can charge and receive electronic commands. Members of each group will control their players on a screen connected to the microscope.

Although the robots can be as long as several hundred micrometers, they are still considered " nanosized " because they only weigh from a few nanograms to several hundred nanograms. For comparison, a grain of sand weighs about 300,000 nanograms. The players will play in three sections to test the overall agility and operability.

RoboCup is an annual international competition, held to promote the invention of intelligent robotics. Although it is a robot contest, in fact, behind it is the creation of human beings.

T. An