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Probably the best (and most fun) way to get more involved in robotics is to attend a competition.  You can either enter in the contest or just lurk and enjoy the ideas and demonstrations offered.  Contests often are centered around a simple goal.  Here are some of the goals of past contests:

Obstacle Course

There are several versions of this contest.  This contest usually includes a predefined path or course through a series of increasingly difficult challenges.  Robots will need to be agile and handle real world problems like varied surfaces, incomplete guidance, and challenging terrain.  Robots are typically scored by a combination of time and distance. 

Rope Climb

In this contest, the robot must find a 9 mm climbing rope that is suspended from the ceiling.  The rope ends about 1 foot from the ground.  Once the robot can find the rope, it must climb to the top and then return to the bottom.  Extra points are awarded for finding the rope, attaching to the rope, and using a hand-over-hand approach to climb/decent the rope.  This contest is rummored to have once been won by a hula hoop with helium balloons attached to it.  It doesn't always take the conventional approach to win. 

Football (Soccer)

In this contest, a yellow tennis ball is pushed by two opposing teams (comprised of a single robot) towards opposite goals on a virtual football field. 

Sumo Wrestling

One of the classics.  Here there is a black disk approximately 1 meter in radius with a white line around the edge.  The disk is raised off the floor about 6 inches.  Two contestant robots are placed in the ring and they try to push each other out of the ring in traditional Sumo fashion.  Several unique approaches have evolved to try to win this type of competition.  One of the more interesting is the "stealth" approach.  Since most robots use the white line around the disk for determining orientation and avoiding the edge, several entrants have devised very flat robots that are totally black.  These "stealth" robots move to the edge of the ring and obscure the white line in an attempt to fool the opponent into driving off the ring.  The first year these "stealth" robots appeared, an interesting thing took place.  Two such robots were pitted against each other and they both just sat on the white line and waited.  The match had to be called a draw.  Sort of like two pacifists fighting one another. 

Fire Fighting

This contest typically takes the form of a maze.  The maze is usually a prescribed color and height and somewhere in the maze is a lit candle.  The contest states that you must navigate the maze, find the candle, extinguish it, and then exit the maze.  Extra points can be awarded for other additional behaviors such as finding an electrical outlet along the way and plugging in to it unassisted.  The Eltec 442-3 Pyroelectric Detector Package we offer has been successfully used in the past to find the candle flame. 

Exploration

This contest often simulates a planetary rover or other form of unmanned exploration.  There is a giant "sandbox" with specific items in it.  Often the shapes are color coded.  The robot is given a specific amount of time to develop a map of the terrain and recognize the various items placed in the terrain. 

As you can see, the goals can be simple but building a robot to accomplish the goal is not necessarily simple.  The fact that several different ideas are demonstrated with the same goal in mind makes these competitions fascinating. 

Here is an incomplete list of various robotics competitions from around the world. 

Botball

RoboCup Junior

Robothon

Trinity Fire Fighting Competition

RoboCup

Western Canadian Robot Games

PARTS Mini-Sumo Robotics Competition

FIRST Robotics Competitions

Eighteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence