The Bold Hearts are the RoboCup team from the University of Hertfordshire. We are the longest continuously active RoboCup teams in the United Kingdom, and one of the most successful. The team was founded in 2002 by Dr.Daniel Polani, and consists of computer science students at UH who have a keen interest in AI and Robotics.

The official long-term goal of RoboCup is to create a team of humanoid robot soccer players which, by the year 2050, will play against the human world champion and win. As a side effect of this major undertaking, one expects the spin off of major contributions to Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, material science and other fields which all involve problems that need to be addressed and solved for this purpose. Algorithms that work under real-time, low-specification conditions; robots that do not break when they fall down; fast, and high-efficiency drives; economic use of energy; and much more.

At the University of Hertfordshire, we are mainly fascinated by the AI challenges that the RoboCup vision poses: how to make a machine understand what to do in a highly general challenge without painstakingly setting out all possible scenarios under which it needs to operate - and thereby to move away from the approach where the details of how the robot should act are pre-specified in advance. This feeds directly into our research and our research feeds back into our RoboCup team. Stay tuned!