RoboGrinder, Virginia Tech’s undergraduate engineering design team captured the 2025 RoboMaster University League (RMUL) North America 3v3 Championship in San Diego, the league’s highest-profile event.
Since its creation in 2017, Virginia Tech’s team has designed and built a fleet of teleoperated and fully autonomous robots for the RoboMaster competition series. The projects integrate mechanical design, embedded systems, computer vision, and machine learning in an industry-like, cross-disciplinary environment.
In this year’s competition, facing a field of more than 30 universities worldwide, the team suffered an early group-stage loss to the University of Colorado Boulder. Mounting a comeback, they managed to continue undefeated through the elimination rounds, ultimately defeating the four-time reigning champions from the University of Washington to secure the title.
RoboGrinder fielded three fully self-designed robots: the Standard Robot, Hero Robot, and Autonomous Robot. The Autonomous Robot, equipped with 3D LiDAR and camera fusion, distinguished itself with efficient obstacle avoidance, precise auto-aiming, agile path planning, and the ability to evade enemy firing lines. The championship reflects countless late nights of repair, testing, and strategy refinement by students across the Mechanical, Electrical, Software, and Operations branches.
RoboGrinder’s faculty advisor since the team’s founding, William Baumann of the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, continues to support the team in all aspects. Dylan Losey of the Department of Mechanical Engineering provided additional testing facilities and played a key role in the team’s preparation and success.
With the championship secured, RoboGrinder now turns to the next RoboMaster season, aiming to advance autonomy, reliability, and performance, remain a fierce competitor, and continue to represent Virginia Tech’s engineering excellence on the field.
VT News: https://me.vt.edu/news/briefs/robogrinder-undergraduate-team-082025.html
Written by: Howard Yu