The Texas A&M VEXU robotics teams competed in the VEX Texas State Championship on February 22, with three teams—WIRED VEXU and Aggie Robotics teams WHOOP and WHOOP5 —representing the university. Seventy-two Texas A&M students participated in the event against teams from across the region.
WHOOP Wins Excellence Award, Qualifies for World Championships
Team WHOOP won the Excellence Award, which recognizes the top overall team based on match performance, an engineering notebook grade and a judge interview. This award qualifies them for the VEX U World Championship in Dallas in May.
“The Excellence Award is presented to the #1 Overall Team in the competition and is the most coveted award in the VEX U Competition,” said Evert Guzman, a senior from the Department of Geology & Geophysics. “I’d say WHOOP excelled in every area of the competition. While we may have missed out on winning the Tournament head-to-head bracket, we only lost by a very slim margin despite one of our robots experiencing a major electrical error from the start of the match. If you can get within a fingertip’s reach of winning a match against a heavy-hitting team like ATUM (Arkansas Tech), with one robot down, that’s a loss WHOOP can feel good about.”
WHOOP also won the Robot Skills Challenge Championship, earning the highest scoring robot’s distinction and securing a No. 19 global ranking in the challenge. The team went undefeated in qualification matches (8-0) against opponents, including Emory University, Florida Polytechnic University, Lamar University, Louisiana Tech University, Texas Tech University, University of Texas at Dallas and Abilene Christian University.
“Winning the Robot Skills Challenge was the most exciting,” said Guzman. “WHOOP’s software team of Akhil Kasamsetty, Dimitri Kalafatis, Drew Deaton, and Sean Mahon worked tirelessly all week and day of the competition, tuning the robot’s autonomous routines for this very challenge. On the very last run WHOOP was allowed to make in the challenge, the autonomous routine finally hit the target score in the challenge. This moved us to first place above Arkansas Tech, which had held the No. 1 spot in the skills competition for the entire tournament.”
WHOOP5 Recognized for Sportsmanship
WHOOP5 received the Sportsmanship Award, which recognizes professionalism and positive engagement during competition. Bradley Stiles, a graduate student from the Department of Engineering Technology and Industrial Distribution and president of Aggie Robotics, supported and empowered both WHOOP and WHOOP5.
“As president, my priority was fostering a strong team culture,” said Stiles. “We emphasized mental well-being—reminding members not to hyper-fixate on minor tweaks before competition day. Instead, we focused on maintaining a positive mindset, ensuring everyone could fully enjoy the experience.”
WHOOP5 also secured the No. 7 seed with victories over Emory University, McNeese State University and Abilene Christian University. The team also received honorable mentions from judges for its vision and autonomous path-planning software.
“As Aggie engineers, we stayed together and helped each other during the hard times in the competition,” said electrical engineering junior Nguyen Tao. “We hope to focus on improving the current design to work more consistently.”
WIRED VEXU Shows Progress
WIRED VEXU secured the No. 10 seed, achieving an upset win over an undefeated University of Texas at Austin team.
“The most exciting moment was beating GHOST (UT). They had won every single qualifying match they were in,” said Manaswi Luitel, a senior engineering student from the Wm Michael Barnes '64 Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. “When we went against them, we were ranked 11 while they were ranked 2. We had also lost to them last year by one point. This is why our win against them was so monumental. We beat them by one point this year, and the way they lost was so shocking as well.”
The team’s success did not come easily, as they had to make last-minute adjustments leading up to the competition. WIRED VEXU focused on adapting its match strategies in real time.
“We suffered the loss of a pneumatic tank the night before the competition, so the capabilities of one of our robots were greatly altered,” said Kendall Frazee, senior from the Department of Biomedical Engineering. “With that, we spent the first few matches redesigning an autonomous programmed routine that would accommodate our lost functionality and still allow us to perform comparably to other teams in attendance.”
Preparing for The VEX Robotics World Championship
WHOOP is refining its designs and strategies for the VEX World Championship.
“Luckily, WHOOP’s robots for this competition are eerily similar to what the plans for our World Championship’s development cycle will be,” said Guzman. “This tournament taught us a lot about robot dynamics in match play and will be invaluable to our improvements for the World Championships.”
The Texas A&M VEXU teams’ performances at the Texas State Championship highlight their commitment to innovation, collaboration and engineering excellence, proving that the program continues strengthening its competitive standing.