VEX U Robotics

The competition

VEX U is the university-level VEX Robotics competition. Each team builds two robots and competes head-to-head against other universities around the world. Teams have to redesign and rebuild every season, leveling the playing field. In the 2025 season, the game was High Stakes. Robots scored rings on poles, controlled goals they could move around the field, and could climb a large ladder at the end of a match.

I started competing in VEX at 13 in the elementary school league, and qualified for Worlds in my first year. Since then, I’ve competed for nearly a decade, qualifying for Worlds almost every year. I joined TNTN Robotics in 2024, and competed with them at the 2025 VEX U World Championship in Dallas, Texas. I’ve spent three years with TNTN (Ten Ton Robotics), competing at university events across Canada and the United States as the Electrical Lead.

My work

My work with TNTN as electrical lead spans firmware, PCB design, and some of the higher-level control and routing code. That means thinking about both the electronics on the robot and how the robot decides where to go.

One of my larger projects was the OTOS, a compact optical localization sensor. I designed its six-layer PCB, wrote the FreeRTOS firmware and sensor-fusion code, and integrated an error-checked RS-485 bus with the robot. The goal was to give the control code a reliable position estimate without depending on bulky encoders.

The OTOS project page goes through the board, firmware, and robot interface in more detail.

Result

TNTN has been a very successful team, holding the world skills record almost continuously for the past four years. In 2025, TNTN won the VEX U World Championship, World Skills Championship, and World Excellence Award. We were the first and only team to have won all three top-level awards in a single season.