NYU ARC Robotics: Standard, Hero, Engineer

Who We Are

NYU ARC Robotics: Team UltraViolet is a student robotics team at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering in Brooklyn, New York. The team was founded in Fall 2020 and is part of NYU’s Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) program, which gives structure to our self-directed research. We’re advised by Julian Togelius, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Director of the NYU Game Innovation Lab, and Christopher DiMauro.

Our members come from many engineering backgrounds, and we’re organized into sub-teams for controls, computer vision, hardware, mechanical design (one team per robot), and operations. We build our robots at the NYU MakerSpace and do most of our programming and testing at the Game Innovation Lab.

The Competition

We compete in the ARC Robotics Championship (formerly RoboMaster North America), an international competition founded by DJI. University teams build several robots that fight in live, esports-style matches, firing small projectiles at each other’s armor plates and defending their own base. Teams have to combine mechanical design, electronics, embedded software, and computer vision, and then use real strategy and teamwork during matches.

We placed 3rd in our debut season in 2021 and have finished in the top five in North America every year since. Our next competition is [month/year and location].

Our Robots This Season

• Standard: A fast, mobile robot with a 17 millimeter (mm) launcher. It covers ground quickly and controls areas of the field for the rest of the team.
• Hero: A larger robot with a 42 mm launcher, strong enough to break through the other team’s base defenses.
• Engineer: Instead of a launcher, this robot uses a 6 degrees of freedom (DOF) robotic arm to support the team on the field.

How the Robots Work

Each robot is controlled by STM32 microcontrollers, which our Controls team programs in Embedded C using the FreeRTOS real-time operating system. Auto-aiming and autonomous navigation run on an NVIDIA Jetson using the Robot Operating System (ROS), written in Python and C++. Our Computer Vision team trains YOLO-based models that detect and track enemy robots during matches.

Our Hardware team connects all of this. They design the custom printed circuit boards (PCBs) and cable harnesses that link the microcontrollers, motors, sensors, and computers on every robot.

Thank you for considering our team. We’d be proud to have PCBWay with us this season.