Purdue's ACM SIGbots win world championship

05-17-2024

Purdue University's ACM SIGBots competed in the VEX Robotics World Championship, presented by the Northrop Grumman Foundation, with a total of 114 university teams in attendance at the event in Dallas, TX.

The event was split into two divisions, both seeing representation from Purdue SIGBots with BLRS in the Spirit Division and a second Purdue team, BLRS2, in the Innovate Division.

BLRS2 team in the Innovate Division

During the qualifications both teams performed well, with BLRS being 5th in their division with a record of 8-1-0 and BLRS2 being 7th in their division with a record of 8-0-1. 

In the elimination rounds, BLRS was able to make it to the quarterfinals before being eliminated by South Dakota State University's team, JACKS. 

The BLRS2 went on to win the grand finals and defeated CalPoly SLO's team, CPSLO, to become World Champions along with winning the design award, the second highest award for the design, engineering and software in the competition. 

Overall, the tournament was a great experience for both SIGBots teams and were proud to represent Purdue University on the national stage. 

Additionally, the BLRS2 won the community award for impact on the robotics community. They were recognized for hosting the largest WIKI for resources in the VEX community, running a coding help hotline for elementary and middle school teams in Indiana, and volunteering at a dozen high school robotics events in Indiana, as well as hosting two high school competitions at Purdue University West Lafayette and the largest college competition in the United States, apart from the national competition. 

Members of BLRS: Chris Jewell, Matt Zimmerman, Isaac Spencer, Rocky Chen, Aaron Smith, Stuart Blank, Taylor Xu, Andrew Lu, Jaden Hernandez.

Members of BLRS2: Joe Lach, Brandon Lu, Joey Krejcie, Sean MacDonald, Dominic Holifield, Stephen Hohnholt, Conner Siebert, Jacob Zawacki, Max Johnson, Mihir Laud, Alex Lam, Thomas Cyze, Connor Nguyen, Kathleen Lowe, Seb Wheeler.

 

Writer: Noam Arie, narie@purdue.edu