Five lunchbox-size wheeled gizmos with pastel splotches on their lids zipped around an area the size of a Ping-Pong table, chasing and shooting an orange golf ball toward a goal. OK, mildly interesting. But they missed regularly, crashed into one another, and sometimes fell apart. For long periods, nothing happened at all. The students that designed and programmed the lunchboxes tapped ferociously on keyboards, ate cold pizza, laughed like maniacs, and periodically paused to share fantasies of kicking the robots across the room or hurling them from 10-story buildings. I had just dropped in for a visit, but this was their life, every day, and often into the wee hours of the night.

Their leader, Manuela Veloso, the CMU robotics professor who is one of the driving forces behind RoboCup, works just as hard as her students, tirelessly promoting her vision of athletic automatons. The long-range objective of RoboCup, she tells anyone who will listen -- and everyone listens when Manuela talks -- is brazen, ingenious and nearly within our grasp: to create a team of robots that will play head-to-head, on the same field, with the same ball, following the same rules and regulations, against humans -- the World Cup soccer champions, in fact, on or before the year 2050 -- and kick butt.

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