It's life, Jim, but not as we know it as robots test Darwin's theory

It is as brutal as Robot Wars can get, a battle between hunter-gatherers, characterised by violence, death and reproduction which would doubtless have overheated the cogs of poor R2D2, the gentle little Star Wars android.

Scientists at the Magna science centre in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, let loose a colony of wheeled robots yesterday – five large "predators", with metal fangs, and six smaller "prey" – for the world's first investigation into how the fittest might survive and evolve, free from human intervention.

But what might sound like a one-cyborg race for the predators is rather different, since the prey are not just pretty, grey boxes.

In 18 months of preparation for the project they, like the predators, have had countless computerised "genes" fed into their sensors, which tell them where and when to move, and how quickly, when seeking food and warding off adversaries. By infra-red "sniffing", they can tell friend from foe.

The name of the game for robots, just like humankind, is gathering energy, which acts as food. The prey find it by nesting and refuelling their solar panels beneath brilliant white lights in the combat arena. The predators procure it brutally, by stalking and nabbing prey and sucking it from their batteries.

Then there's the reproduction bit. Periodically, the "fittest" two robots (those with most energy) will be removed and half of the "genes" of each programmed into another robot. They will replace the weakest, whose attributes will disappear from the "gene pool". The process will evolve over two years.

The leader of the £500,000 project, Professor Noel Sharkey, is hoping the robots will become biomimetic – mimicking behaviour in the natural world – and that those programmed to hunt in packs will prove the fittest, enabling their genes to be passed on.

Professor Sharkey, the Sheffield University academic who has helped make hunks of grey metal a part of popular culture in Robot Wars, said: "My own feeling is that they won't hunt in packs until they are very evolved. To begin with we think they actually will try to fight each other off to get at the prey."

No one knows precisely how the robots will evolve. The only certainty is that successful strategies for existence, accumulated through "generations", will be passed on in true Darwinian fashion and that the robots should eventually accumulate sufficient experience to develop fairly sophisticated escape routines and complex hunting strategies.

Round-the-clock monitoring of the robots will have all the excitement of watching the Big Brother webcam so Magna has created a 500-seat auditorium for the contest, opening on 27 March. Audiences can pick favourite robots and egg them on during a 30-minute show.

Professor Sharkey, head of the creative robotics unit at the £46m Magna centre, is trying to develop more intelligent robots for dangerous tasks, including space exploration, where machines might need to adapt to changing environmental conditions.