Confusion Ann! Whether it's yours or mine I'm not sure but please clarify as you know more about this than I do.
a) If you're going to program an avatar as a 'bot this is a local issue for your PC. You're quite right to say bots are allowed in SL and that by 'self-declaring' any arguments are prevented. On the other hand, there is not much LSL can do to control an avatar, so you wouldn't need to script in-world to make your bot.
b) If you wish instead to use LSL to script objects in-world then bots are irrelevant but everything else you've said is quite true.
Either way, I'd have thought "crappy sensors" would apply even more to SL than RL when it came to robot control. A fun project, to say the least!