Hey, sounds like a cool idea. Kinda like a cyberpunk version of chess :lol:

You're definitely going to need a path-finding routine. Now there are a whole bunch of path-finding routines, each of them has their own advantages and disadvantages. There's the A* algorithm which is very fast and is fairly easy to implement. You might also want to take a look at Dijkstra's algorithm which is not normally referred to as a path-finding algorithm but I've used it for exactly that purpose before. Probably the easiest path-finding algorithm (and maybe also the least effective one) is the so called depth-first search algorithm. Just type any of these keywords into google and it will spit out a whole bunch of results.

As for robot-AI, that all depends on the rules of your game which haven't become quite clear from your post...