RoboCup '97 will pit mechanical squads from America, Canada Australia, France and Japan against each other in a series of real matches and simulated games on screen.

The aim of RoboCup is to give robot laboratories a new goal, to stimulate the discovery of new techniques for artificial decision-making and to imitate that elusive human quality, "common sense".

To create robots that can play football as a team, a wide range of technologies must be integrated. The engineers will face a far more challenging task than a club manager would face in building a human squad.

Multi-agent collaboration, strategy acquisition, knowledge-sharing, real-time reasoning and sensor fusion come naturally to footballers but these skills have to be built into robots, says Hiroaki Kitano of Sony's Computer Science Laboratory and chairman of the organising committee.

RoboCup's target is a world cup with real robots in Nagoya, Japan, in August next year. If successful, it will be repeated every two years.

Many programmers are testing their strategies and tactics on a simulator, the code for which can be downloaded by laboratories from the Internet. When they think they have perfected their software they will load it into binary-brained mechanical footballers that will pass and shoot.

At Osaka in Japan, where Gary Lineker finished his playing career, a squad of robots on tracked wheels has video cameras for heads so they can keep their eyes on the ball.

In the United States, Dr Milind Tambe at the University of Southern California is adapting software used in flight simulators. "We are building two mini-teams to play a match against each other," he says.

"Our players do not yet show any team spirit ­ they all attempt to get to the ball and score themselves. Our plan is to give the players the ability to engage in teamwork, to recognise opponents' teamwork and to counteract it."

Many of the engineers have been inspired by a team of ball-kicking miniature vehicles, known as the Dynamos, developed at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

Other work is being done at Carnegie-Mellon University in the United States, which makes robots that can climb volcanoes and others that can harvest crops. One of its graduates, Peter Stone, has completed research into how the automatons can beat defenders and shoot for goal.

A contest by robots could even prove to be more acceptable to some spectators because the foul play and violence that mar the human game will not happen in RoboCup. The machines will be programmed to follow the laws of football un questioningly. They will not have arms so there will be no hand-ball offences or shirt-tugging and, as they cannot speak, there will be no excruciating post-match interviews.

And at the end of it all, the effort will produce much more than entertainment. Much of the artificial intelligence and common-sense routines developed for RoboCup will one day be put to use in the service of mankind, whether in space or in factories or even to create mechanical servants for the home.