Founding

Lavery

VT CRO was founded in November 2023 during a senior design robotics project organized by Stephen Moyer and the IEEE branch at Virginia Tech. Initially, the senior team worked exclusively on their capstone project, and a small group of underclassmen were allowed to contribute. Sensing a larger need for a robotics team at Virginia Tech, Marco Gonzalez Hauger proposed starting an independent design team.

In the late night of November 8th, 2023, Marco Gonzalez Hauger, Maxwell Kawada, Jayson De La Vega, and Ramzy Saffarini met in a room in Lavery Hall. Marco laid out three options: Help the senior team, build a dedicated component for the senior team, or start their own design team. The cons of starting a team were: everyone was doing difficult majors, had other club involvements, and didn't have extensive experience in the subject matter of robotics. After much debate, the team decided to do it anyway, and the name Competitive Robotics Organization was mentioned for the first time.

Later, a small group of seven students, including Marco Gonzalez Hauger, Maxwell Kawada, Jonas Von Stein, Ramzy Saffarini, Jayson De La Vega, Zach Moas, and David Bonds, agreed to take on the challenge despite the risks of heavy workloads and limited resources. The VT CRO Charter was written, outlining the vision for a new student robotics organization. Stephen Moyer, who recruited the original seven members to help the senior team fully supported the group, and provided guidance to build the team.

Durham 373

Over winter break, the team maintained momentum through online Zoom strategy meetings, solidifying plans for their first robot. Once the students returned, they had the first election, where Marco Gonzalez Hauger, Maxwell Kawada, and Davids Bonds ran as President, Chief Engineer, and Treasurer respectively, all unopposed. There wouldn't be another election for the club until March 2025, two and a half years later.

The newly elected President drew the structure of VT CRO on the white board (seen in picture) that allowed for an operations team, support teams and multiple design teams with sub teams, anticipating a large scaling of the club.

By early spring, VT CRO’s first recruitment campaign exceeded expectations, drawing 32 students to an interest meeting. To establish the club and secure funding, a professional website (vtcro.org) was created, professional headshots took, along with a new branding strategy.

Funds were secured from the Student Engineers' Council for materials and travel after a funding proposal was granted. Impressed with the organization's vision and branding, the Senior Design Team that CRO was originally supposed to support was placed under the VT CRO umbrella, doubling membership, however the teams had an understanding that there would be no direct CRO oversight.

Among the first recruits was a Sophomore in Aerospace Engineering, Tyler Kraics, who would become indispensable as the VP of Operations, and Aarushi Jain, who would become responsible for winning VT CRO's first two 1st place award the next year. Additionally, Boeing was recruited as a sponsor, and gave the club it's major funding landmark, committing $40,000. The club was now organizationally and financially sound, but engineering progress was slower than expected. As of April, nearly 5 months after work began on the first bot for SoutheastCon, the bot had little mechanical functionality, as well as no code. The engineering team insisted that they would not be ready in time, and the President was asked to call of going to competition, and instead go next year once the team gets more experience. This suggestion was not taken, with Marco insisting that they could win, despite not directly working on the bot in several weeks.

Orlando

On April 13th, at about 7:30pm, the team arrives in Orlando, FL at their Airbnb. After the team unpacks the robot and materials on the table. After unpacking, they check out the Venue, an expansive conference hall in the Orlando Hilton. The team get some food, and go to bed for an early start the next day. At 8 AM on February 14th, the team wakes up and begins working long hours on the bot. Around 10AM, Marco discovers that no code was written for the robot, and is finally confronted with the situation: With 24 hours left, the team had to get the electronics working, fix mechanical issues including broken servos, attach all the wheels, and write an entire codebase that can autonomously control a robot for 2 minutes straight, including being precise enough to flip a switch at the very end of the run, and be competitive with 30 other universities that have been working on their bots for a full year, not just 5 months.

Given this impossible situation, Marco take direct control over the project around noon with 22 hours until competition. The first decisions to be made were to ditch the sonar which took too many pins and wasn't reliable, simplify movements to not be dependent on any external inputs which made each run identical and reduced electrical and software complexity, and finally for all coding to be done on only one computer until competition time. With the new goal defined, the team with a deep sense of urgency gets to work. For the next 22 hours, aided by energy drinks and coffee they worked nonstop until competition time. At one point, the team had no hard surface to test the bot on, so a bathroom off to the side of the building was found where the team continued without interruption.

As Orlando fell into night, teams began fatiguing and making major mistakes. Around the room, large and small bots began combusting into sparks and small flames, with larger bots with multiple subsystems being at a major disadvantage due to the difficulty of maintenance. Among the teams disadvantaged was the senior team, which had multiple last-minute system failures. Here, VT CRO finally had a break: due to the now extremely streamlined nature of their bot, there were no complex subsystems that could fail, and maintenance was relatively easy for the electrical team. With there only being a couple hours left, some members decided to sleep, with a small group staying behind. With Mechanical systems finished, the rest of the work fell to Jonas and Aarushi on Electrical, and Marco on for writing the full codebase. The team didn't take a single break for entire 22 hour stretch, and by the time they were done, VT CRO's first robot was consistently scoring impressive runs.

At the competition, VT CRO scores the top 2 runs of the entire competition, beating all other teams by about a 20% margin. Due to a unluckily placed game object on the final run, VT CRO only won 2nd place, losing to West Point. However the results of the team were undeniable, and the club was solidified as a competitive group.

Spring of 2023

With the performance in Orlando, VT CRO in 6 months had become one of the most successful design teams at Virginia Tech that year, and put in an undeniable strategic position. VT CRO was now a well organized club with an effective operations team, a scalable model that allowed for multiple competitions teams, an experienced core group of engineers who knew how to compete, lab space, funding, a sponsor, and a legitimate and impressive win under its belt.