Wildcat Robotics Hosts Inaugural BattleBot Tournament
Members of the Wildcat Robotics’ Liberator team show off their BattleBot, which placed fifth in the Sonoran Showdown tournament on March 23. From left: Jarrod Smith, Mark Rutschow, Wolfgang Roettiger, Ben Nguyen. Photo: Wildcat Robotics
The University of Arizona’s Wildcat Robotics club hosted its first robot combat tournament, the Sonoran Showdown, in March. Thirty-eight teams brought their robots to the event at Pima Community College’s downtown campus to battle wheel-to-wheel for cybernetic glory. ECE regents professor Michael Marcellin serves as the club's advisor.
The club was created last year by a team of students completing an Interdisciplinary Capstone project. Team 23037 showed off its BattleBot Disarray at Craig M. Berge Design Day in 2023. A few days after Design Day, the team piloted the 250-pound heavyweight Disarray to flawless victory at the Battlebots: Destruct-a-Thon competition in Las Vegas, establishing itself as a force to be reckoned with in the biggest arena for combat robotics.
Eight of the club’s BattleBots competed in this year’s event, including Liberator and UFO; the robots placed fifth and seventh in the 3-pound tournament, respectively. ECE sophomore and vice-president of Wildcat Robotics Wolfgang Roettiger led the team behind Liberator – a 3-pound BattleBot featuring a horizontal-spinning undercutter that devastated its foes by attacking their weak, low-lying points.
“You’re in a tight-knit team, and you actually get to compete with your engineering, which is really fun,” Roettiger said.
Wildcat Robotics will bring the Sonoran Showdown back again next year, starting an annual tradition that aims to get more people interested in robotics design and BattleBot competition.