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SPEAKING OF COMPETITIONS: SpaceDaily has an article on the RoboCup Games.

The article doesn’t really make the connection it alludes to in the title, namely Mars and robotic soccer players, but the point is easy enough to see — this competition is developing software and other technologies for cooperative action among autonomous robots, which could be applied to swarms of small, mass-produced and therefore comparatively inexpensive “cooperative” robotic rovers for use on Mars.