The challenge for roboticists is developing machines that may think and act autonomously, able to analyse sensory data and act in a meaningful way, as a human would.

Depending on the league, control can be as simple as one notebook computer - or a computer for every robot. Most work on wireless LANs.

It was once thought that getting robots to act intelligently in the real world would be a fairly trivial step beyond computer simulations of such an environment. Several decades later, we now appreciate the complexity of the tasks that nature manages with such apparent ease.

Despite millions of dollars, countless postgraduate students, academics and corporations, robots can only begin to operate intelligently within a tightly controlled environment. Any attempt to generalise a vision or learning algorithm into something mildly human-like is met with little success and a great amount of frustration.

There are several factors which are making this technology evolve slower than we’d like. One is the inter-disciplinary nature of robotics and A-I (henceforth just called intelligent robotics). Robotics researchers may have a background in any number of engineering and scientific fields: computer science, cognitive sciences, mechanical, electrical or software engineering.