VexU Robotics 2025 - High Stakes

My Role On the Team

I joined this team as a general member in the second half of first year to help them develop the new swervedrive drive-train. And after a sub-optimal performance at the championship in 2024 I decided to take up a major role on the team as the Director of Mechanical. Throughout the year, I had many more resposibilities other than just designing the robots. From project manager hiring and hosting perliminary brainstorming sessions early in the summer, to teaching and onboarding all the new general members. Being on this team was super rewarding experience throughout the year.

Our Robots

yapa yapa yapa

Competitions

RIT

The RIT event wast the first major event that our team attended this year, and it was an amazing event that really let us test out how our robots would fare in real match conditions. Although we did not win the tournament, we cam suoper close, coming in second place over all, but also winning the Excellence Award, the Design Award, and being the Skills Champion. So overall it was still a great showing for our team.

Mecha Mayhem

Althoug I personally did not attend this event, it is still worth mentioning as at this event we were once again the Skills Champion, and recieved the Judges Award. This was also the event where we qualified for the world championship.

World Championship

This was my second time attending the world championship with the team, and as aswalys, it was the highlight of the year. We started off performing very well in the first 2 days with a 6-1 win record but by the end of the qualifying matches our record dropped to 6-3, which thankfully was good enough for us to come in at 12th place, out of the 60+ teams in our division, which meant we moved on to the elimination rounds. Unfortunatly, due to a (in my opinion unwarranted) disqualification, we were knocked out early. But we didn’t go home empty handed, as we recieved the Build Award, which recognizes “a well-constructed robot that is built with a high degree of attention to detail in order to hold up to the rigors of competition”, which was amazing to see as the Director of Mechanical on the team.

Credit

VP of Technical Operations - Cole Jowett

Oversaw the development of the robots and handled most of the software.

Co-Director of Mechanical - Will Steedman

Designed and built several subsystems, including the intake, scorer, and mobile goal intake.

Director of Electrical - Mike Stefan

Designed the odometry board to intake lidar data to a jetson nano, and wrote custom firmware.