Gursimar Virk - 30lb Robot

This summer and fall, I led the design and build of a 30 lb combat robot with my team at UC Berkeley. We started from scratch in June and had a fully assembled, battle-ready robot by late September, just in time to compete at the Orange County Maker Faire. Next up, we’re setting our sights on the Vegas BattleBots 30 lb TV show competition.

What makes this project special is that we pulled it off in just 4 months, overlapping with my Amazon Robotics internship, my work at Sorcerer.Earth, and the first month of school. As team president, I took on the role of technical program manager for the entire build, but I also dug deep into the technical side: managing materials, machining, and heat treatment as the only Materials Science minor on the team. On top of that, I served as one of the competition drivers, and pulled my fair share of late nights assembling, wiring, and troubleshooting to get us across the finish line.

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Here is us just messing around while building. We were just really excited to see the weapon spin!

I manufactured many of the custom parts in Berkeley’s Jacobs Machine Shop, even driving across the Bay to have key pieces heat-treated for maximum toughness, and took the lead on the weapon design to ensure it had both resilience and efficiency. While that was my main technical focus, I ended up working across nearly every subsystem on the robot, whether it was wiring, machining, or troubleshooting during assembly. As TPM, I managed 15+ team members, coordinated parts flow, and kept deadlines on track, all while personally stepping in to solve last-minute engineering fires. The result was a fully functional 30-pound combat robot that went from CAD to competition in record time, built by students, under real-world constraints, and tested in live combat.

Here are just some more pictures from my time with the robot

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