Watch live: College of Science Undergraduate Celebration 1
The London Northeastern Robotics Club beat 11 other teams to the 2025 title during a tournament held at the University of Cambridge.
LONDON — When three engineering students founded Northeastern Robotics Club on the London campus, they wanted a challenge.
The trio — Lucas Aulisi, 19, Daniel Brightman,18, and Asher Hunter, 19 — decided to enter Unibots UK, a nationwide competition for university robotics clubs, to test their skills. The target was simply to get a machine together that could compete — they didn’t expect to walk out of the arena as champions. But that is exactly what they did.
Aulisi, an electrical engineering major, said the winning feeling had been “incredible.”
“I was very proud of our robot but I did not anticipate going this far,” said Aulisi, a native New Yorker. “We were extremely stressed out, especially because there was an elimination bracket following the preliminaries, so losing once meant getting eliminated. I am very proud that our robot and the trophy are sitting in the back of the engineering classroom for all to see.”
The three-person team beat 11 others for the 2025 Unibots title. During the two-day competition held at the University of Cambridge in March, they progressed to the knock-out rounds after placing in the top four of a mini-league after four round-robin ties. They then came out on top against rival opponents in both the semifinal and final.
“It was great to win,” said Hunter, a computing engineering major from Calgary, Canada. “We worked really hard for a few months with planning and designing, and the last week was a huge grind. Having that reward, it was really nice.”
The aim during the bouts, Brightman explained, was for teams to use their robots to shepherd balls from the arena’s playing area back to their corner.
During mini-league matches, four teams would take part in the scramble to pick up the balls, with the highest number of points going to the team that retrieved the most balls. In the knockout rounds, two robots had to face off against each other, with the team with the most balls winning the game.
The Northeastern team’s robot had a feature that set itself apart from the others and ended up giving them an edge over their rivals.
When brainstorming their robot design, Aulisi came up with the idea of incorporating a Hoover-like mechanism so that the robot could vacuum up the balls and hold on to them until the power was switched off. They found that installing a vacuum motor meant having to do less coding, to build fewer parts and it gave them a tactical advantage.
Brightman, a mechanical engineering student from Boston, explained: “Most people pick the balls up and scoop them back to their area of the arena. But we thought it would be really fun to use the vacuum to suck them up and hold them inside the robot and bring them around that way.”
The unique design was not entirely without challenges, but the team was able to make some last-ditch changes that ironed out the glitches on the eve of the competition.
“One issue we had while implementing it,” said Aulisi, “was that the motor driver — the part connecting the main circuit board with the vacuum motor — was overheating because it could not handle the power load.
“On the last day before the competition, we swapped it for a different part, called an H-Bridge transistor, and added a bunch of extra wires to decrease resistance of the electrical flow between the parts.
“This was very hectic as we weren’t sure it would work and we had no time left if it failed. Luckily, it worked pretty well.”