Foul 2050: thoughts on physical interaction in human-robot soccer

The RoboCup community has one definite goal: winning against the human world soccer champion team by the year 2050. This implies real tackles and fouls between humans and robots and rises safety concerns for the robots and even more important for the human players. Nowadays, similar questions are discussed in the field of physical human- robot interaction (pHRI), but mainly in the context of industrial and service robotics applications. Our paper is an attempt for a pHRI view on human-robot soccer. Technically, this will be years ahead, but still we believe it is enlighting to analyze the RoboCup vision from the perspective of pHRI. We take scenes from the 2006 FIFA World Cup as examples and discuss what could have happened if one of the teams consisted of robots instead of humans.