Utah Student Robotics (USR) is my student robotics team at the University of Utah. In three years so far, I have served as Mechanical Lead and then President.
I grew this team from a small group whose only award was a five year old third place. We have now broken 4 national records, received 3 first place awards, a numerous others. I personally ran 3 large scale robotics projects from start to finish, working countless hours every week in SolidWorks creating full models, updating them, building from them, and then testing to fulfill systems requirements.
My work with Utah Student Robotics lead to many of my other projects featured in my portfolio, including TERI, ELE, and Archimedes.
USR competes every year in The NASA Lunabotics competition, which “invites students from higher education institutions to apply NASA’s Systems Engineering principles to design and build a prototype off-world construction robot. Participants will develop a robot capable of performing construction operations that support future space exploration objectives.” In 2025 of the 81 Universities to apply, 39 team’s project management plans were accepted. After the first round of digging, 10 robots were invited to Kennedy Space Center for the finals.
The challenge of Lunabotics is to create a simulated Moon Rover with a task of excavation and construction. Designs are put through a rigorous and complicated series of moon ready standards. Put simply, scoring takes your construction score, and divides it by your power use, and mass.
This is a selfie at Kennedy Space Center, by an Engineering from the VIPER team. They designed a REAL Moon Rover to search for Lunar Ice. I am in the striped shirt with the hat.
Mechanical Lead
As mechanical lead, I was responsible to plan for and lead weekly Monday meetings and Saturday build sessions. I prepared agendas, presentations, trainings on subject matter and safety, and organized my group of 8 engineers.
This involved late nights hitting deadlines, and a higher level of understanding required to teach those new to engineering the required skills.
Two guiding principles through my leadership were simplicity, and modularity. My experience is that extraneous work grows in difficulty exponentially, and that the simple options naturally more robust. I showed this in my clean and straightforward designs, which hit every goal with nothing extra.
This photo shows me laying on the ground, adjusting the bars after a particularly difficult run. Every design I was a part of was incredibly modular and flexible (when we chose). Because of the stressful environment, these robots could be entirely loosed to fit a new part, adjusted after an injury, or repositioned to fit a change needed in the code.
President
After the 2024 season, I was elected by my peers to be President of Utah Student Robotics. I had spent the entire year taking note of successes, failures, and improvements — and now I had the chance to implement them. As President I was responsible for General meetings every month, design reviews quarterly, admin meetings every week — and also attending sub team meetings as an example of how involved all of the engineers should be. I really did do everything.
A full team meeting that I lead in January 2025. Attendance was around 80 people.
As President of USR, I was chiefly responsible for everything in the club. To me, 100% responsibility means that when something falls through, or someone disappears, it is up to me to either replace them or to fill the gap.
This responsibility was shown when I put in whatever hours were needed to finish a project a management plan, or a systems paper, but none more evident than when I stepped in and took the additional roles of treasury and outreach. When the people in these roles got overwhelmed and dropped off, I took over and filled the gaps. I took on balancing a $30,000 budget, raised $80,000 of donations, and organized nearly a dozen outreach events with the city & public schools — expanding outreach to hundreds more.
I gave a keynote speech at the city summer event, and did a showcase of TERI
Outreach poster presentation at a K-12 SWE and Girl Scouts Event
Successes As President of USR
Late night testing in the Utah RAPTOR, wearing a full suit of PPE.
I grew USR from 9 members to a peak of 87, with 40 members putting in multiple hours every week. We developed TERI, with all of its success. I helped us find 8 new sponsors who donated funds, Lunar Simulant, all sorts of materials to build our test pit, metal for the robot, and our travel. USR went from a homeless organization to having 2 dedicated lab spaces, 1 additional permanent meeting space, and our very own robotic test pit with the Utah RAPTOR. This year produced a robot that was lighter than anything produced since before COVID, and broke the all time record for most construction, twice.
From the second half of April to the end of May I was full time dedicated to the success of USR. Late nights testing, improving, and organizing. I have rarely felt more in the zone than when I was running between groups passing along tasks on something that broke, passing new parts between people, and just generally pushing the whole team through testing. I was a real leader, and we became a well oiled machine in the month before we drove our robots down to Florida to compete at Kennedy Space Center.
Awards
2024 Lunabotics:
-3rd Place Robotic Construction
-3rd Place Presentation and Demonstration
-3rd Place Robotic Autonomy
2025 Lunabotics:
-The Artemis Award / Grand Prize
-Systems Engineering Paper Award
-First Place Outreach and Engagement Award
-First Place Presentation and Demonstration
-Second Place Robotic Construction
-Autonomy Award
-Effective Use of Communications Power Award
A judge who worked on the space shuttle program congratulating us after the awards ceremony.
Prizes that went to the team included a $9000 cash prize, 6 plaques and 2 trophies, and our favorite: An Artemis 1 flown mission flag - that went to the moon.
Being 100% honest — I learned more, and gained more applicable skills, in Utah Student Robotics than I did in my entire coursework so far. I value my university education immensely, and this isn’t to discount it. The principles in my classes give me a deep and thorough understanding of mechanics of all types.
But USR gave me a chance to be an engineer. To follow the engineering method from problem definition to a finished project. I was a leader over a team. I reported only to myself until the competition day, self motivating and reaching my own deadlines. I learned about broader engineering and also technical skills. For the first time I applied controls, circuits, materials science, machining, and prototyping. When I list these skills now I know more than just theory, I’ve used them. My leadership in Utah Student Robotics is an incredible asset to my education, and gave me my passion for robotics.