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Building and playing teams is a familiar exercise in engineering, programming and design. But until recently I was unaware of a much more interesting type of robot competition. Forget football it's all about the rescue robots.

Rescue robots have to travel across simulated disaster zones and track down survivors with a variety of sensors. They have to find buried people by tracking heat, sound and even the CO2 produced as people breathe.

Which brings us to students at the University of Warwick who are entering their rescue robot in several international competitions this year. This will be the third set of students to upgrade and enhance this particular model. And this year they're including some Midlands tech I've blogged about before, Kinect a videogame accessory that was partly developed in Birmingham. More here.

Kinect is designed to track and follow the movements of players so for example you use your hand like a racquet in a tennis game to "hit" the ball. But it is a really sophisticated piece of technology. As well as motion tracking and analysis it can also "see" a room in 3d and map it, it even has voice recognition. But because it's mass produced it costs around £100 as opposed to more specialised sensors the team were considering that cost around £3000.

And while Microsoft and Rare don't appear to condone this peeking under the bonnet of Kinect we have seen a thriving mod scene spring up. is a good place to start and you can find a great article and some nice videos .

It's not the first time what is essentially a toy has attracted the attention of researchers. Sony's robot dog, aibo was another popular target for scientists looking at robots. Once again because it was designed for the real world it was robust, though complex and (relatively) affordable. Here's just one .

Sony too wasn't that happy with people hacking into the digital innards of their product. But in time they actually released a kit for use by non-commercial programmers. It may well be that Microsoft and Rare come to the same conclusion. If people want to strap your toy to a rescue robot that's really quite a compliment.

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