When you think of robot wars, chances are you think of the TV show Robot Wars, with remote control cars beating seven kinds of crap out of each other with axes and hammers.

That’s not what real robot competitions are about: follow a white line. Drop a marble at a given point. Detect, stop and beep at a blockage placed by the judge. And so on.

But even this level presents problems: the upfront cost and the relatively restricted range of functions that most of us have to settle for. Microsoft’s online RoboChamps contest can give you access to a simple competitive arena, for free.

Instead of building robots by hand, RoboChamps takes them into a virtual space, with 3D graphics and a full physics engine to simulate environments, such a maze. This immediately opens up the ability to attempt cool challenges that you’d never be able to do in the real world, such as controlling the Mars Rover, or recreating last year’s DARPA Grand Challenge by coding a robot to navigate a busy city.

RoboChamp roboteers, activate!

The most important part, as far as Microsoft is concerned, is that the contest isn’t just a way for long-standing robotics fans to challenge each other. It’s also a way of getting people interested in robot development in the first place. The core software is Microsoft Robotics Development Studio, which hooks into Visual Studio or Visual Studio Express for the heavy lifting. (Visual Studio is free to students, with a demo free for non-students to experiment with.) The scenarios are free to download, with coding starting out as simple as linking blocks of code together and filling in a few text boxes. This isn’t likely to get you all the way to a winning robot, but it’ll get you started.

What makes the prospect of getting to the RoboChamps finals even more exciting is that you’re not simply coding for a 3D model that looks like a robot, but a fully simulated one, including its tools and sensors. Via the software, you can see exactly what your robot is seeing and access any of its systems through simple bits of code.

The league final takes the obvious next step, downloading the winners’ code into actual robots and having them perform for real.