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UT Austin’s VEX U Robotics Team Wins 1st Place at VEX AI World Championship
UT Austin’s Robotics and Automation Society outperformed teams from around the globe with cutting-edge engineering, teamwork, and fully autonomous robots to claim the top spot at the 2025 VEX AI World Championship.
UT Austin’s IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) VEX U team competed in the Vex AI World Championship in early June in Houston, Texas, taking home first place in the tournament along with several other awards.
VEX U is an international competition in which each team develops robots to compete in a fully autonomous game that changes every year. This year’s game involves scoring rings of your color on mobile goals and climbing a ladder.
“As the suspense of the playoffs built, we found ourselves tied 1-1 in the best-of-three finals,” said team member Karmanyaah Malhotra. “We entered the most stressful match I have ever experienced in my robotics and sports career. When our robot climbed the ladder and placed the ring on the top goal, our stress transformed into glimmers of hope. As the match wrapped up and the opposing team couldn't score enough points to surpass our unique top-goal mechanism, we felt relieved and incredibly excited about what being tournament champions meant for our team.”
Back row, left to right: Johnny Shen, ECE ’28; Richard Aguilar, ASE ’28; Jake Wendling, COE ’25; Joseph Weiss, ME @ Austin Community College ’27;
Joseph Romero, ME ’26; Melissa Cruz, ASE PhD; Maxx Wilson, ASE PhD; Front row: Karmanyaah Malhotra, CS ’27
The team’s smaller robot (Omega Jerry) focused on scoring the mobile goals efficiently and is a well-rounded fielding robot, whereas their larger robot (Alpha Jerry) was focused on many of the climbing points and scoring on a goal at the top of the ladder. All their robots were first designed in CAD and then prototyped across many iterations. As well, the team also has an advanced software stack, running on ROS2, the industry standard software environment for robotics, and utilizing lidar for robot localization.
Besides placing as tournament champions, IEEE RAS’s VEX U team was awarded for having the best professional engineering documentation and for their sportsmanship.
“In my opinion, the most exciting part is competing in each match and having the opportunity to showcase the skills and ability our team is capable of,” said team member Michael Portillo. “However, another amazing part of the competition is getting to meet intelligent, incredible people from all over the world with the same passions and aspirations as you.”