A University of New South Wales (UNSW) team of student engineers and their robots are in Hefei, China to compete in the RoboCup World Championships.

The team will defend their 2014 World Championship title in the Standard Platform League.

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Listen Duration: 3 minutes 20 seconds 3 m 20 s Sean Harris tells Lindy Kerin the UNSW team are prepared for the match Download 6.1 MB

The waist high robots play on a nine-metre-long field, much smaller than a regular soccer field.

"Under-6s soccer is the best comparison," said team leader and PhD student Sean Harris.

"They've got two eyes, a face, legs, arms, torso, just like a regular person, and they're a little bit clunky in the way they walk around."

Each team has been given the same robots but it is the software design that gives players the edge.

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"In our competition it's a standard platform, so everyone purchases the same robots and then it's all about the artificial intelligence and the programming and the smarts that you give the robot," Mr Harris said.

This year organisers have changed the rules so that the game more closely resembles a real soccer match, but it has made the competition more difficult.

"The goal posts used to be yellow and nothing else on the field was yellow, so it was pretty easy to spot the goal posts no matter where the robots are," Mr Harris said.

"Now they're white so they just look like everything else on the field - all the robots are white and all the lines are white - it's a very common colour and it's very hard for the robots to see the goal posts."

The games now start with a whistle in the finals, meaning the robots have to be able to listen for a whistle sound as well.

"There are a lot more extra challenges that you have to fix before you can even get back to the same level as last year, let alone improve on that," Mr Harris said.

The robots are supposed to all be the same, but Mr Harris said it was difficult not to become attached to the lifelike machines.

"They all have their own quirks, we name them after different things," he said.

UNSW robot kicks a ball in the RoboCup World Championships ( UNSW )

"This year's robots are named after Norse gods, so we have Thor, Loki, Odin, things like that and they all develop personalities."

It might seem like just a game but robotics does have a serious side, and Mr Harris said the technology they use could be applied more widely.

"So for example, we also compete some years in the RoboCup rescue competition, where we have to get a robot to navigate around a disaster scene, build a map and find victims and rescue them," he said.

"So we can use the technologies that we make, that we develop for RoboCup soccer, where a robot has to find where it is on the field, communicate with its team-mates and pass the ball around, and use that technology to then develop other applications like how to coordinate robots in a rescue scene."

The University of New South Wales team won the championships last year when they defeated Germany, and Mr Harris said right now his team was looking good.

"After the round robin stage we go to a group of 16 and then it's knock out from that point onwards and we're looking pretty good we think," he said.

"We're quite optimistic at the moment that things will go well."