Meet Our Team

The mechanical committee serves as the club's project improvement force. We work on projects that benefit the club's goals and facilitate robot combat. Currently, our goals are to enhance Railside Rumble by improving the large arena with projects such as ventilation and arena traps, and to facilitate robot combat construction by designing a test box for larger robots (12/30lb) and dummy robots for drive practice.

Our current projects include: Antweight Training Bot, Antweight Pack Flat Test Box, Beetleweight Arena Improvements, "Big Bot Test Box," and Arena Traps. These projects serve to enhance the club's presence in the combat robotics space, both on campus and around our local competitions.

Our big projects that will continue into the foreseeable future include the "Big Bot Test Box," an extremely durable test box designed to facilitate the construction of 12 or 30-pound combat robots in the future. Beetle weight Arena Improvements, as the club continues to host Railside Rumble, enhancing both the competitor and viewer experiences is essential to making the club the best it can be.

The Electrical Committee handles electrical projects for the club and makes electrical component decisions for onboarding. Our primary goal is to expand the club's electrical expertise and improve the club experience. One of our main goals for the semester is to gain power consumption data for various bot components to help members be more informed about electronics decisions. The main skills we look to teach our members are digital electronics, rapid electrical prototyping, and PCB design.

Most of our work last semester was focused on the arena controller (lights, sound, timer, etc), but we have branched out owing to new members joining. We are not focused on providing an in-house PD board, arena improvements (screens, traps), and bot power logging. This semester marks the first time Railside has designed and ordered custom PCBs, and we are working on improving the arena controller with new PCB modules.

While our long-term plans are far from finalized, we hope to consistently improve the arena to improve the competition experience. Beyond this, we will have continuing projects in offering part testing to teams and building out our database. Ultimately, our team is new; last semester was our first where projects actually occurred, the skills of the members are still improving, and the future may see some exciting projects like a custom bot mainboard for onboarding or custom ESCs.

The business committee is responsible for conducting all outreach, managing sponsor relations, creating media content, and promotional materials on behalf of Railside Robotics. We meet once per week and collaborate to plan upcoming events and review individual tasks. If you are interested in marketing/sales, digital content creation and video editing, social media management, photography/videography, accounting, event planning, or just love robots and business as much as we do, make sure to contact us on any of our social media platforms or Boilerlink!

We are currently working on a variety of projects, including T-shirt creation, improving our social media management strategies, and developing promotional video content to better represent Railside Robotics. In addition, we are heavily involved in planning and organizing upcoming events, ensuring smooth execution and effective outreach. Through these efforts, our team continues to strengthen the club’s presence and engagement both on campus and online.