Gidday from Down Under mate.

[Tiberius]

So, your "robot war" robots don't actually fulfill your own definition of the word robot!

Just getting a robot to move forward in a perfect straight line needs a lot of programming...trust me At the end of the day, the only difference between a fully automated robot (of which you seem to like more) is that instead of the robot figuring out if it needs to go forward, and then working out how much to turn the motors, a human is giving the first instruction.

Perhaps is might be interesting to see how two robots fair when they have full autonomous control on them. I think the easiest way would be some kind of tracking beacon placed on either robot which broadcast a signal that both robots could receive, thus they would know the position of the robot, perhaps even the direction. If you were really clever, you could send a different signal when the robot executes an attack (such as a weapon swing), and program the other robot to react accordingly. The program aim would be to chase the other robot into a position where it cannot escape the weapon as easily as it could in an open playing field, whilst at the same time avoid the other robots advances.

Actually...that doesn't sound half bad. I might have to try it with some lego robotics