Competition results, outreach events, and newsletters — a running record of what the team has built and where it has taken it.
Our winter newsletter: how the mechanical, electrical, and computer science sub-teams got the NRC sumobot ready for Marion, Ohio, plus the outreach we ran alongside it.
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Everything before the story above, newest first. Each card opens the full write-up, most of them with a photo gallery from the day.
IGVC
Our first trip to the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition in Rochester, Michigan. The robot took a design award and the team came home with Rookie of the Year, despite a split gearbox casing and a rough time on the course.
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Pumpkin Chunkin
The old trebuchet was coming apart, so the team rebuilt the whole thing out of 4x4s with a new loading and firing mechanism — then won the competition with 966 points.
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NRC
A full-body spinning combat robot and a self-driving Traxxas running ROS on a Jetson Nano, both headed for the National Robotics Challenge — until Covid-19 halted the season mid-spring.
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Outreach
Members refereed the robot game and judged robot design at the regional FIRST LEGO League qualifier in Rapid City — a record 20 teams of 9 to 14 year olds.
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Super Robo Time
Our annual kick-off with UAS and the 3D Print Club: a lab scavenger hunt, then a few weeks of teams building battlebots out of the same box of parts and fighting it out in the arena.
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Pumpkin Chunkin
Efficiency work on the trebuchet got last year's distances out of roughly 30% less counterweight. A cold, rainy day and heavier pumpkins than we had practised with left us in 5th.
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ASME
B.A.M. — the Ball Acquisition Machine — at the Lansing E-Fest for the Pick-and-Place Race. It won its first elimination round, then stopped dead after a collision in the second.
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Pumpkin Chunkin
A booth at Main Street Square and a trebuchet at Memorial Park. Trailing going into the final throw, the team borrowed weights from a rival, threw farther than ever before, and took the trophy.
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ASME
Robot soccer in Pomona, California, with three bots in a 50 cm cube: one shooter and two defenders with solenoid kickers. A solid mid-table finish against roughly 32 teams in our first year at the competition.
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IEEE
11th out of 29 teams at the IEEE Robotics competition, built together with the UAS team and the 3D Printing Club. The camera never quite came together in time.
Read the write-upNothing written up under that one yet.
Write-ups land here a few times a year. The day-to-day happens elsewhere.
Build photos, competition trips, and whatever is on the bench this week, posted as it happens.
See our InstagramCompetition trips, workdays in McLaury, outreach events, and a decade of robots in various states of assembly.
Open the galleryOur Discord is where meetings get scheduled, questions get answered, and new members get pointed at something to build.
Join the DiscordEvery story on this page started with somebody turning up to a meeting. No experience required — tell us what you are curious about and we will put a tool in your hand.