Gidday from Down Under mate.

[Tiberius]

Haha.....Sorry to disappoint but I hated it!

I always felt they were nothing more than heavy duty radio controlled cars, not "robots".

Autonomy has absolutely nothing to do with the definition of robot. Robot means nothing more than worker (it even comes from the Czech word for hard work). A robot is a machine (or software) that is programmable to do a certain task, it has nothing to do with doing that tasks on its own.

If you ever did a university course in Robotics allan, you'd probably understand why creating a autonomous fighting machine is impossibly hard. The Control Theory on such a robot would be horribly complex code, and you would have to create a Localisation system that was able to detect the difference between walls, objects, and other robots. I'm afraid that if the robots were all completely autonomous, the fight would last for hours as well. It would be very boring. The human element adds the excitement and tactics to the robot.