For the past four years, Dr Navinda Kottege and his CSIRO team have been honing their skills in the area to compete at this month's Robot Olympics - the final of the international subterranean challenge in the US state of Kentucky.
Dr Kottege says Australia is one of only eight teams from around the world to have made the final and the only team from the Southern Hemisphere.
"So this challenge is about sending a fleet of autonomous robots into a completely unknown underground environment where you don't have GPS, to know where you are, you are not given a prior map so need to be able to develop various technologies to be able to tackle this challenge."
His non-human team will consist of two track robots, two four legged-robots and two drones that will be given the task of navigating the tricky environment, detecting certain objects and reporting back.
As well as the glory of going for gold at these Olympics, there's also quite a financial incentive for teams competing.
A 2.7 million dollar research prize for the victor; more than 1.3 million for silver and 677,000 dollars for bronze.
