EINDHOVEN, Netherlands On any other soccer field it might be considered a disaster.

The forwards keep getting calls against them. The goalie falls over when the ball isnt even near the net. As for the striker well lets just say he wont be rushed when he lines up to kick the ball.

But this isnt the Champions League.

Its RoboCup 2013 and what it is championing is robotic technology and artificial intelligence. While the robots may seem a bit bumbling, theyre getting smarter every year and by 2050 the goal is to have a team of robots beat humans at their own game.

A team of 20 University of B.C. students is here among the 2,500 participants from around the world and while in early rounds their pint-sized robots the Thunderbots were holding their own, the most lasting impact will be sharing their knowledge and learning with others here, a kind of robotic crowd-sourcing that each year ensures the soccer-playing robots advance even more.

Its definitely more than the time on the playing field, said Andrea Palmer, out-going technical team lead, who is heading up the Thunderbots along with incoming lead Andrew Wong.Its a great learning experience for everyone on our team.

We brought two first year engineers and they actually got to sit down with the second best team in the league and talk through all of their code and all of their electronics and they learned a lot from that.

We have PhD students on our team who are also learning so its a great experience for everything and to see the amount of intelligence thats in this room right now, and with all the sponsors here and being able to learn from them and interact with them its an amazing experience.

Its a playing field thats not exactly level, though. Jacky Baltes, a professor of robotics at the University of Manitoba and the organizing chair for the humanoid league at RoboCup 2013, said UBC and the University of Manitoba, the only two Canadian teams in the 40-country event, dont enjoy the kind of funding other countries expend on boosting their robotic research.

Both of these teams have been very successful, the UBC team has focusing on the small size league and we have been focusing on the humanoid league, he said.

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