I think the back nine are going to be pretty important. Without them, you're limited to 3 keepers (and I doubt most alliances will score all of them, or most of them) and the 9 ringers from the human player. That's not that much. Also, if all of your robots can only take tubes from the human player, you're limited to three tubes per team, which amount to a lot of robots driving around doing nothing.
Picking tubes from the back nine is going ot be hard. Scoring on the opponent's side of the field will be even harder. But that might what separates the boy-bots from the man-bots
