Advanced RMIT Competitive Robotics

I founded Advanced RMIT Competitive Robotics (ARCR) and grew it into a team of more than 80 students across mechanical, electrical, and software. We ran full design-build-test cycles on a tight budget, and the robots we built went on to win competitions.

Photo by Kevin Chen

Getting the club off the ground meant first figuring out how it would actually run day to day. I took the team through complete design cycles, starting with CAD work that produced parts we could really manufacture and proper technical drawings. Every robot had to balance weight limits, material choices, and what we could realistically build with the money we had.

Photo by Kevin Chen

A big part of leading the team was making sure the mechanical, electrical, and software work all fit together. I wrote up the requirements so everything stayed within the competition rules and the subsystems had clear interfaces, which saved us from the kind of integration headaches that can sink an entire build.

The electronics were their own challenge. I designed the robot electronics, including power distribution and motor control circuits, and helped take PCBs from schematic through layout and fabrication. Custom boards were really the only way to get reliable behaviour under the beating these robots take in competition.

Testing was a constant loop. We bench-tested individual parts, then ran live tests in a controlled setup. Every test taught us something and fed straight back into the next revision, so reliability built up gradually through failure analysis and a lot of prototyping.

Photo by Kevin Chen

It paid off. We won competitions, brought in sponsors, and ran workshops for both industry people and high-school students through STEM outreach. The club's profile also opened doors to teams from MIT, Purdue, Duke, Carnegie Mellon, and Caltech.

Photo by Kevin Chen

Photo by Kevin Chen

As ARCR grew, I was invited onto SYN radio to talk about the club: the engineering we were doing, the competitions we were entering, and the hands-on culture we were trying to build for students who wanted more than classroom robotics.

Near the end of my degree I also pushed to get the club officially recognised by the university and to bring on a dedicated academic advisor. That backing mattered for the long run, since it gave future cohorts a clearer path to resources and mentorship as the leadership changed hands each year.

In the end the club was about building engineers, not just robots. Running multiple design cycles took students from a rough idea all the way to live competition, and the focus on iteration, failure analysis, and prototyping lined up closely with how engineering actually works in industry.