I'm completely with you, and it could be a great way to get the public interested in (i.e. funding) technology. It reminds me of when auto racing actually led to improvements for street cars. I mean kids already love various robotic cartoons - who wouldn't love the same as a real-life game. Attendance could be a little dangerous though...
Yea - sounds right to me. Perhaps even kill targets on the vehicles to limit? I'd think we'd get to unkillable bots pretty quickly with aerial ones - maybe I'm wrong though. Reminds me of the spinning blade bots that seemed indestructible...
Only the well engineered spinning blade bots (like Ziggo) were nigh indestructible.
I think a lot of this could be addressed by adding ground targets to go after or protect. I can also imagine lots of munitions which would be hard to just shrug off or dodge, like nylon nets or lasers hitting photocells rigged as cutoff-switches.
Let's hope UPenn's QuadRotor Lab is in the running. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvRTALJp8DM