Teams of robots jostled on a miniature artificial soccer pitch as androids answered trivia questions and took jabs at human ignorance on Thursday at an artificial intelligence summit on the technology's wide-ranging uses.

Organizers said the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva showed how the technology could improve and even transform lives.

"Sometimes we think about AI as just something big," said Tomas Lamanauskas, Deputy Secretary-General of the U.N.'s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) which staged the event.

"At the same time, AI can be embedded in so many more things in everyday life... Whether for flood forecasting, disaster management, early-warning systems, agriculture, or health. It's across the board."

Displays showed off prosthetic limbs that could learn from a user's behavior and adapt to muscle activity, devices to help visually impaired people avoid obstacles in the street, and bionic cats and dogs built to act as companions.

The football-playing robots were the work of a group of students from the University of ETH Zurich.

The team kicked, passed, and kept track of the ball based on input from sensors.