Students' BattleBot Featured by Daily Star

Six students from the College of Engineering are working to create a 250-pound battle robot to compete on the TV show “BattleBots.” Not only is this a lifelong dream for some of them, it's also part of their senior Interdisciplinary Capstone project. The Arizona Daily Star recently featured an article from El Inde Arizona on the students' work, described as a "Herculean task." The students have worked through nearly 20 designs using computer-aided design software (CAD), and they are finally working to bring their robot into the real world.

The capstone team includes ECE students Yousuf Choudhary as the software lead and Karson Knudson as the safety and electrical systems lead. The team has two goals: to build a robot that complies with the BattleBots TV show rules and to lay the foundation for a new student club for combat robotics, which will be called Wildcat Robotics. ECE Regents Professor Michael Marcellin will serve as the robotics club advisor. 

Choudhary works on coding the telemetry system for the robot. The telemetry system allows the team to analyze its motor speeds and temperatures in real-time, so they can make quick strategic adjustments during a fight.

“There’s many different layers of making sure that when this bot is not supposed to have power and not supposed to be moving, then it doesn’t have it,” Knudson said in an interview with the El Inde Arizona. 

The robot, named Sting, is planned to be unveiled at the College of Engineering’s Craig M. Berge Design Day on May 1.