Wildcat Robotics Hosts Inaugural BattleBot Tournament

The University of Arizona’s Wildcat Robotics club hosted its first robot combat tournament, the Sonoran Showdown, in March. Thirty-eight teams brought their robots to the event at Pima Community College’s downtown campus to battle wheel-to-wheel for cybernetic glory. 

The club was created last year by a team of students completing an Interdisciplinary Capstone project; Team 23037 showed off its BattleBot Disarray at Craig M. Berge Design Day in 2023. A few days after Design Day, the team drove the 250-pound heavyweight Disarray to victory at the Battlebots: Destruct-a-Thon competition in Las Vegas, establishing itself as a force to be reckoned with in the biggest arena in combat robotics.

Mechanical engineering graduate student Al Hurworth, who serves as president of Wildcat Robotics, said the Sonoran Showdown event is a priority for the club. Throughout the school year, members work together to design and build 3-pound or 1-pound combat robots to compete in the showdown’s two weight divisions.

“At the end of the day, it’s their design,” Hurworth said. “They get to build it, they get to drive it at the competitions, they get to test it, they get to fix it at the competition.”

Robotics teams from across the Southwest came to compete in the Sonoran Showdown. Roughly 10 robotics teams from Arizona State University participated, as well as other in-state builders and teams from Las Vegas. After organizers advertised the event, registration reached capacity in three days.

“We had to cap the registration because it was a double-elimination tournament, so it was 40 teams, times two–– we had to go through 100 or so fights,” Hurworth said. “It was a big event.”