It's an annual international robotics competition proposed and founded in 1997. The aim is to promote robotics and AI research, by offering a publicly appealing, but formidable challenge. “Competition pushes advances in technologies. What we learn from robots playing soccer or navigating a maze can be applied to industry and help us solve difficult real-world problems,” according to Professor Maurice Pagnucco, Head of the School of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW. The name RoboCup is a contraction of the competition's full name, "Robot Soccer World Cup", but there are many other stages of the competition such as "RoboCupRescue", "RoboCup@Home" and "RoboCupJunior". In 2016, the world's competition was held in Leipzig, Germany. RoboCup 2017 will be held in Nagoya, Japan.