This post was originally about “retiring from ctfs”, but I changed my mind, and edited the post to be about Robocon.
In 2023, after I moved to a new school for A-Levels, I joined the school’s Robocon team which competes in the annual Robocon Malaysia competition (winner gets to represent Malaysia for the actual ABU Robocon).
Unfortunately, Robocon Malaysia 2024 was cancelled, as the competition was becoming biennial instead of being annual. However, UTM stepped up and organised a friendly match between schools instead.
Our team still lost some motivation after the official competition was cancelled, and was very last minute in making our robots for the friendly match. Thus, our robot didn’t perform too well, but the team learned a lot from the competition.
I didn’t work on the robot much before the competition. But as the robots still had to be used after for Open Day, I rewired one of the robots pretty much completely to organise it, and in the process I learned a lot about power management, basic wiring & connections, and more.
it was still very messy, but i learned a lot
After seeing how good the other team’s robots were during the friendly match, and how skilled other people were, I was really motivated to get better and put more time into robotics.
Fast forward to Robocon Malaysia 2025, we improved a lot, and our robots performed a lot better.
Our team was definetely capable of reaching the quarter finals, but we were placed in arguably the toughest group of the competition, and didn’t manage to make it.
Our robot 1 were having some problems during the competition days, but after it was fixed, it managed to make 6/9 three pointers (after moving) during testing, and was looking very promising: robot 1 shooting vid
Unfortunately, our robot 1 never fully fulfilled its potential, as it couldn’t dribble effectively.
Thankfully, our robot 2 worked pretty well, and even managed to score a bucket (after the game ended): livestream link
If you want to see more of our robots, my team leader made a short highlights video: here
I wanted to work on more mechanical tasks this year, so I worked on designing the double flywheel shooter our robot 1 used with my teammate. We prototyped and tested multiple different designs, before coming to this design in the end:
irl view:
I learned a lot about mechanical design, fabrication, and control theory through this.
I mainly only worked on the shooter this year, and helped write a little bit of software here and there. The rest of the robot of course, were built by my amazing teammates. I really loved working together with them, and I learned a huge ton about robotics from them. I’m very proud of what we’ve all built together.
A lot of them are leaving since they’re going into their last year of uni, and I’m also leaving since I already graduated A-Levels and is no longer studying at the school. I believe we all have improved a lot and gained a lot of experience through robocon, and I’m very grateful for having such great teammates to work and hangout with.