The radios you mentioned are something I'd like to have someday. I think what makes games like these cool is the fact that your code controls an army of robots. It's more fun than just having two robots duel it out.
Sort of a programmable MMO/RTS, where the fun would be the strategy development and extra-game political aspects.
Where I'm getting hung up is on the exact game mechanics; I want to make it so the simulation runs for a long time, but I don't want a single player or team able to develop an insurmountable advantage. I'm thinking to start you get a robot in a sandbox world where it would gather resources and you could test strategies, and when you're ready you can transport the bot to the real world to compete.
I was writing this in C++ so the memory overhead per robot was just barely over 64k. A server with 8gigs of RAM could run a simulation in memory with about 100,000 bots, periodically saving the game state to disk in case of a failure.