One of the long-range objectives of the RoboCup initiative is to develop robotic technology to the point that, within the next fifty years, robots can play soccer at a competitive level against humans. In this paper we first make some comments on the Turing Test, proposed by Alan Turing in 1950, and then advance a proposal for a new kind of experiment to allow machines to compete against humans. We suggest to give human operators the same view of the playing field as that of autonomous robots, to let persons operate a team by driving them, and thus let humans play against a fully automatic robot team. In this way soccer matches of humans against robots could be held in the immediate future and the perceptual capabilities and ability of the autonomous robots could be more adequately assessed. We propose to held a “Robotic Turing Test Challenge” at RoboCup tournaments which would allow us to gauge the state of the art in this field.
