http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gladiators
I'm thinking the robots will be playing a variation of the "Assault" game from the American Gladiators TV show.
Assault (1989-1996): The two contenders competed separately against a single Gladiator. The object was to fire a series of
five weapons to hit a target at one end of the playing field. Below the target, a Gladiator used a cannon to shoot tennis balls at speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour at the contender. The weapons used by the contenders were located near protective barriers and varied from season to season. The weapons included a crossbow, pneumatic "rocket launcher", and "cannon", a handgun, as well as softballs at the final station. Hitting the bullseye scored 10 points (10 for the white circle & 7 for the red in earlier seasons) for the contender. In the most common version of the event the contender earned a point for each weapon fired as well as a bonus for crossing a finish line near the Gladiator's platform within 60 seconds. Getting struck directly by a tennis ball (ricochets off the floor or walls did not count) ended the round.
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Robots must wear different-colored Spandex unitards to designate their alliance. "Zap", "Turbo", and "Gemini" will serve as honorary human players who man the tennis ball cannon that attempts to block the shots of the robots as they shoot at targets high up on a platform. The 5 point hinged disk in the game hint(hinge cropped out at top of photo) is one such target. The targets will have different lights behind them to aid targeting via the vision camera (the green-lighted target will be worth the least amount of points per hit since more teams know how to target that color). The higher-point targets will also be harder to reach - further away, shielded in some manner, etc.
Because it will be hard for humans to score the number of times an alliance's robots hit the targets, there will again be some kind of automatic scoring system that will most likely not work as well as the designers intended, hence the indirect reference in Dave's sig to the Dirty Harry quote, "I know what you're thinking. "Did he fire six shots or only five?" Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself", in the same way that the scoring software will lose count again this year.
