Sonoma State's combat robotics team

Two remote-controlled machines fight inside a sealed arena until one stops moving or time runs out. If both are still running, judges score the match on damage, aggression and control.

It is a design sport before it is anything else. Whatever a team got right or wrong shows up in the first thirty seconds of a match, which makes it one of the fastest engineering feedback loops available to a student.

Members design a robot, build it, drive it, and repair it between matches. The chassis, the wiring, the weapon and the driving are all done by students.

We build to SPARC, the construction standard used across combat robotics, so what leaves this room is legal at real events rather than only legal here.

Every major, every year. There is no application, no tryout, and no requirement that you have built anything before. Most people arrive having never soldered.