While most of the world is tuned to the FIFA World Cup in South Africa right now, there’s a different World Cup of sorts going on in Singapore. RoboCup 2010 is now underway, marking the 14th anniversary of the games which pit robots against one another in five different soccer leagues.

You’ll find everything from two-legged humanoids to small, polka-dotted robots no bigger than a coffee can competing in various leagues this year. Heck, there’s even a league for virtual robots, where computers go head-to-head to test the limits of artificial intelligence. Of course, the goal at RoboCup 2010 is not just to win, but also to push robotics in a way so that it can be applied in the real world. Eventually, it would be nice to design a team of robots that could beat the World Cup champions, but that’s a long way off.

While the games are significantly slower than those in South Africa, it’s still cool to see humanoid robots passing, dribbling, and shooting just like their human counterparts.

In one league, 24 teams are competing with 60-centimeter tall custom bots in games of three on three. The only two U.S. teams competing in this league are Virginia Tech’s Team DARwIn and the RoboPatriots from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Each robot on the RoboPatriots team costs around $2,000 to build, and Sean Luke, a GMU computer science professor, is confident that his team will fare better this year. At the last RoboCup games, they designed the robots to track the orange blobs to which represented the ball, but as it turned out, the green field they were on was surrounded by orange flooring, so the robots were constantly wandering off the competition area. Oops. At least they weren’t drones say “download flash games.”

RoboCup 2010 runs until June 25.