Robots will be subjected to test in national robotics competition sponsored by the Defense Department on Friday and Saturday, December 21 and 22, according to MSN News.

Seventeen humanoid robots will be evaluated at Homestead Miami Speedway as each will be tested to perform and complete tasks, which include getting into an all-terrain vehicle, the report said.

The tests involve simple, but advanced human activities. The purpose of the competition is to find out if the robots could function in environments where conditions are dangerous to humans, like disaster zones.

Unlike the robots designed by Boston Dynamics that was recently acquired by Google, the robots that will participate in the competition move slower than human beings, but are controlled by people who tell them what action to take, the report said.

The robots that will win in the competition this coming weekend will move into the finals next year. The winning team will get $2 million from the Defense Department as part of its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

One robot entry is from Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Laboratories together with students from the University of Pennsylvania and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. The robot, which is 6-foot (1.8-meter) tall, 300-pound (135-kilogram), was being controlled by an engineer in a practice session last week. The engineer used a joystick and a computer mouse to tell CHIMP where and how to move as it picked up pieces of rubble.

"We want the system to be intuitive to untrained operators," Bill Borgia, the director of Lockheed's intelligentrobotics laboratory, told MSN News.

Another robot entry is from Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon Univeristy. CHIMP, which stands for CMU Highly Intelligent Mobile Platform, is just above 5 feet (1.5 meters) tall and is one of 10 robots that were designed and built from scratch over the last 14 months, the report said.

"We wanted to design a robot that had roughly human form, so that it fits in the environment that humans operate in. But we didn't want to take on the difficult task of building a machine that is too humanlike," Anthony Stentz, director of the National Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon and the lead researcher on CHIMP, told MSN News. "For example, walking on two legs presents a major engineering challenge, so CHIMP rolls on treads, like a small tank. It has treads on its arms, too, and gets down on all fours to go over rough terrain."