Forget Beckham and Owen, Giggs and Defoe - the true future stars of football look likely to be a little less animated, and a lot less maintenance.

The first ever UK Robot Football Championship is about to take place (April 5th and 6th, 2004) and Devon engineering students are at the forefront of the cutting edge technology.

Plymouth University will be taking on a team from Warwick University and that means a clash of loyalty for at least one student.

Tim Harding from Sampford Peverell near Tiverton is a 4th year student with the University of Warwick and has helped design and build their footballing 'bots.

Roboteers at Plymouth University are already well ahead of the game

"Plymouth have been building these robots for the past 10 years," he says, "so really they are well ahead of the game.

"I know I come from Devon but I shall have to be cheering on my own squad on the day!"

The 'players' are basically super-intelligent boxes on wheels that can recognise a colour and pack a good kick. The pitch marks and rulings correspond, more or less, to conventional soccer.

Tim Harding and his colleagues at Warwick have produced their team of robots from scratch - each of them costing around £100 to make.

"There's very little human intervention once the match starts," says Tim. "The pitch is monitored by three cameras attached to a computer which decides all the players' moves.

"The only thing a human needs to do is to press stop or start on the keyboard!"

A GAME OF TWO HALVES
There is, however, a human referee whose job it is to time the two five-minute halves and watch for fouls, fixed cable connections and owners intervention during the match.

The robots must be fully autonomous with all the powering on board.

The Warwick squad with "Team Evolution"

Although it all sounds like a lot of fun, there is actually an educational purpose to the Championships too.

"Robot Soccer is an entertaining way of promoting artificial intelligence (AI) in robots," Tim says.

"We're already seeing similar robots in domestic use, like lawn mowers that sense the edge of the grass and vacuum cleaners which you just switch on and leave to their own devices to clean right up to the edge of the carpets."

"This is just a fun way of demonstating progress in the field of AI."

TOMORROW THE WORLD
Shortly after the National Championships have been staged the teams will be limbering up once again.

This time for the European Championships which take place in Munich in June 2004. Eleven countries including the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain will take part.

And at the 2004 FIRA (as opposed to FIFA) Robot World Cup in Korea, more than 110 robot soccer teams from 23 countries will compete.

Whatever next? Perhaps a prime time TV series - "Robot Footballers' Wives"!