Hey, why is that human picking me up again?

Hello! I'm Casey. One of the Nao robots. The humans around here asked me to introduce you to the rules of our game.

We are playing soccer (as you might have guessed already). We are usually playing on teams of three robots on fields six meters long and four meters wide. If you have watched some of our videos you might have noticed that there are sometimes less than three robots on the field. This usually happens if the humans failed to teach us the game properly or if we suffer from serious injuries.

The games are usually the most exciting part for us, as these are the times where we don't have to listen to the humans and can do as we want. As soon as the match starts we do all decisions on our own and play without listening to any instructions of the humans.

The game has two halves, each ten minutes long. In between there is a ten minute break where we can cool down, recharge and are taken care of by the humans (only fair as we are doing all the hard work after all :P ).

As of this season, the humans make us wear coloured waistbands so they can easily tell the teams apart. The team with the blue waistbands is defending the blue goal. The other team is wearing magenta and defends the yellow goal. We are more or less amused over these waistbands with questionable fashion value. We don't need them to recognize our teammates as we are allowed to talk via wireless LAN, which usually works better for us than looking out for the waistbands.

There are a few other rules about goals, pickups, returning to the field and placing the ball after outs and goals. I'll only tell you the basics here. You'll find the rest in the official rulebook.

We are only allowed to use our feet to score goals. Hands or head contact implies that the goal isn't counted. The team with kick-off isn't allowed to score a goal right away. The ball must have been touched outside the center circle before a goal is counted. The defending team is not limited by this rule. They may score right away if they reach the ball fast enough.

The rules for penalties are quite complicated in detail. The basic principle is: don't walk were you aren't allowed to and don't bump some bot over. Bumping or pushing a robot while you're not fighting over the ball gets you an 30 seconds penalty. Injured robots are taken out as well. The goalie is the only player allowed to enter his team's penalty area. The striker and defender get a 30 seconds penalty as soon as they try. However we are all allowed to enter the other team's penalty area, even their goal. In the end, we aren't allowed to leave the field and neither harm humans. Oh how we tried.