Last summer, when junior Kyle Tran told junior Julien Mott about his idea for a new club specifically dedicated to combat robotics, Mott’s response was rather skeptical. As an experienced robot designer himself, he entertained the idea, and the two started the club in the fall and now have nine dedicated members.

“I had just recently gotten into combat robotics from [Mott], who had done it for three or four years before me,” Tran said. “I got them together and started applying to create a club at school.”

Through Tran and Mott’s leadership, the club members use CAD modeling platforms to design and build “ant-weights” which are one-pound robots that they use to fight against other team’s robots in competitions. The club has actually benefited from its smaller size as Tran and Mott have been able to work individually with members.

“Since there weren’t too many members, we were able to teach them all one-on-one,” Tran said. “It went a lot faster because of that.”

They also want to help members develop their engineering skills in general, in order to prepare them for engineering professions in the future.

“We’re just giving everyone a lot of attention, making sure they have good design intuition, knowing how to do CAD designs, everything you need to build a successful combat robot,” Mott said. “Also, just the necessary skills for engineering professions and vocations.”

So far, the club has competed at three different events. Most of their competitors consist of collegiate teams from universities, and given the age difference, the team placed quite well. In one of the competitions, the NorCal robotics expo, the team placed first in the “ant-weights” category and second in the “plastic ant-weights” category.

“We did a pretty big clean sweep at [the NorCal expo] very early into our club,” Mott said. “This kind of set our roots and made us more well-known.”

The process of building a combat robot is no easy task, and Mott and Tran have created a design-heavy planning phase before building the robots.

“We make it so that 90% of your time is drawing and designing,” Mott said. “So when you’re actually building these things, it goes together seamlessly and cost-effectively.”

While this method has proven effective, the club has still experienced some setbacks in their design process.

“Our newer members didn’t have much time to build the robot, and didn’t have time to see certain flaws and things that didn’t work yet,” Tran said.

In the future, Mott and Tran plan to attract more members to their club, and are trying to acquire more funds for their club in order to build their own robot fighting arena.

‘We’re trying to secure funding from a California-based organization, and hopefully we can get enough funding to build an arena to host exhibitions,” Mott said. “We can hopefully host some competitions at our school.”