An Australian team will do battle next week against 24 other outfits in pursuit of $US5 million ($6.6 million) prizemoney at the Abu Dhabi Formula One circuit.

But they won't be racing cars. Instead, the University of NSW engineers will compete using drones and a ground-based robot in a search and disaster response simulation.

It is the richest robotics competition in the world and is named after the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohamed Bin Zayed.

"The focus of the competition is disaster response," said Mark Whitty, lead researcher for the engineering team.

"Take the Fukushima disaster, when the Japanese reactor went into meltdown. The robots they tried to place were unable to do things like walk up stairs, unscrew nuts and bolts – basically incapable of doing anything useful."

Dr Whitty said that while the competitions are fun, the end goal is for the deployment of search-and-respond robotics that are safe, co-operative and autonomous.

"A big challenge in using robotics during disasters is communication," he said. "From 9/11 on, there have been problems. We need systems that don't rely on cables or uncertain WiFi and other systems."

The UNSW team must use drones they have designed to locate and land on moving vehicles. Those four hexacopter drones – Flippy, Floppy, Flappy and Fally – were developed by seven students and three UNSW researchers.

One drone will land on a truck, pick up a target object and deliver it to a final destination.

But that's just the first of their heroic labours – they also have to use an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) to approach a mock disaster site.

The UGV, called Pepper, has a top speed of three metres a second - about 11 kilometres an hour. The drones can fly at 60km/h, but the competition speed limit is 30km/h.

"Our UGV has to drive to a location, identify and pick up a certain size spanner, then grip it and use it to turn a valve stem," said project leader Dr Stanley Lam.

In total there are four challenges:

• a single drone locates, tracks and lands on a moving vehicle;
• a ground-based robot locates and reaches a second ground vehicle, opening a valve on its side;
• a team of drones must work together to search, locate, collect and place a set of static and moving objects;
• the grand challenge is a combination of the first three.

The UNSW team has entered all four challenges and Dr Whitty rates their chances.

"Of the 25 teams selected we are ranked second of those that are funded independently," Dr Whitty said.

"We are taking a crack team of students. It's the same group that won best technical performance and blitzed the course record at the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition in 2015," he said.

The team's name, Saving Robert, "came out of our lab's theme of saving vegetables", says team member John Lam, who now works at Microsoft in Seattle.

"We had a pet onion plant in the lab called Allen and it died," Mr Lam said. "We've now moved on to a carrot, called Robert, but we haven't planted it yet."

What will they do with the prizemoney if they win?

"I imagine the students will want to continue to support the development of robotics at UNSW," Dr Whitty said.

This could be in the form of preparing for other events, buying equipment and supporting younger students, including high-school kids, he said.

In total, 143 teams from 35 countries applied to enter the competition. But only 25 made the final cut.

Other teams that are through include some of the best robotics outfits in the world from Carnegie Mellon University (USA), ETH Zurich, University of Tokyo and Imperial College London.

Three of the 10 team members are UNSW graduates: Stephanie McArthur is now at Google Waymo, working on self-driving car technology; John Lam is at Microsoft in Seattle; and Samuel Marden is at Uber in Pittsburgh.

Other team members are Chris Lu, William Andrew, Daniel Castillo, Harry Dudley-Bestow and Dominik Daners.