Our History
UNT Robotics was revived in 2018, but robotics and engineering culture at North Texas runs much deeper. Here’s the story we’ve been able to piece together.
Origins
Our roots run deep. Students have been building robots at North Texas since at least 1977, when the Eagle Robotics Society got its start, back when the school still went by North Texas State University. A UNT Robotics Club carried the torch forward in 2007. We’re proud to be the latest to pick it up, one link in a robotics tradition here that stretches back nearly fifty years.
Our own chapter takes shape in 2015, when the “Robotics Club at UNT” was founded. It ran out of Discovery Park and the university library’s Factory makerspace, holding officer elections, workshops, and Fall kickoff meetings. Members built laser-cut meArm robotic arms, and by 2017, under Charles Bido (president) and Robert Maxson (vice president), the club was working to charter an official IEEE Robotics & Automation Society student branch. In 2018, a new generation of students took the reins and relaunched it as the UNT Robotics you see today.
The modern era
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2018
The revival
Sebastian King and Nick Tindle relaunched the club as UNT Robotics, kicking off the chapter that runs today. The first meeting was November 28, 2018 in Discovery Park room 201, with Tindle as president, Juan Ruiz as vice president, and King as webmaster. untrobotics.com went up that December.
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2019
CoolerBot, SofaBot, and a first-place drone
The club threw itself into building. The new Rec Bots crew kicked off two flagship projects the month it formed, CoolerBot (a driveable robot cooler) and SofaBot (a driveable couch). The competition team took first place at IEEE Region 5 with an autonomous balloon-popping drone. Members ran the first Botathon that spring (robots popping each other’s balloons), wrote a club constitution, and held officer elections. The club stood up its own Discord in October, landed a SOLIDWORKS sponsorship (a 30-seat license), and secured a dedicated robotics room on campus. By November, the idea for an Aerospace division was taking shape: fly a rocket and a near-space balloon carrying the club logo.
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2020
Divisions, and a pivot to virtual
February brought the club its first taste of going viral: a clip of Sofabot, the rideable robot couch, spread across Twitter and Facebook. Weeks later COVID-19 closed campus and Botathon 2020 had to be cancelled. The club kept building online through Zoom and Discord instead, running CAD and OpenRocket workshops and fielding a VEX U team. As the year went on, a roles-and-divisions system let members pick their teams, an aerospace and space community formed, and the 3D-printing channel that still anchors half the club’s builds got going.
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2021
The biggest growth surge on record
Campus reopened and membership exploded, with 153 new members in a single month (September 2021), the biggest recruiting spike in club history. The club spun up a dedicated High-Power Rocketry team, started by Joseph Moore (a former Marine Corps EOD technician), to enter NASA Student Launch, backed by sponsors including RESPEC, Mouser, and O’Reilly. The NASA JPL Open-Source Rover started in October, first as a rocket payload, then as a build of its own. Members competed at HackDFW in Frisco, ran Botathon Season 3 (Pirates), built an eight-foot rocket-shaped trophy case, and teamed up with UNT Fashion Design students on custom club apparel.
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2022
Rockets, rovers, and a bigger Botathon
The rocketry team flew hard. After a subscale flight to 4,588 feet, they took their full-scale rocket “Sparrowhawk” to competition, lost it to a launch-pad anomaly, and turned straight around to start Season 2 with a new camera payload. Rover build nights filled the workshop, the club shipped its automated dues and “Good Standing” system on untrobotics.com, and an Arduino wind-turbine build went to HackUNT. Botathon Season 4 (Football) debuted the club’s own Xbox-controller driver and live 3D printing during the event. Members also ran a model-rocket day for about 40 scouts, and Sofabot came roaring back after two years off.
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2023
To Huntsville and back
The rocketry team’s biggest year. After passing NASA’s design reviews, they traveled to Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama in April to fly “Phoenix,” a 9.3-foot rocket carrying a Raspberry-Pi camera-and-radio payload. Members visited the real Open-Source Rover at NASA JPL that summer. Botathon Season 5 (Mario Kart) lit up the Discovery Park hallway, projects went to Senior Design Day, and the club ran STEM events for hundreds of K-12 students across the metroplex. Workshops covered KiCad PCB design with a professional guest, GPS and radio programming, and Python.
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2024
A new flagship, and a competition team
Members voted in a new flagship robot: Scrapp-E, a tracked companion bot with an animatronic head and modular arms, themed after Scrappy the eagle. A full-size wooden mock-up was standing by December. A competition team, the “Scrapaholics,” formed to enter DJI RoboMaster. Weekend sessions pushed Sofabot’s drivetrain and steering toward finished, the rover’s software effort restarted on ROS 2, and members volunteered with robotics students at a local high school. Botathon Season 6 was Capture the Flag.
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2025
The rover drives, and Botathon gets tactical
The JPL Rover moved onto a Raspberry Pi 4 running ROS 2 with RoboClaw controllers, with build days every Friday. Scrapp-E’s chassis and drive parts came together through the spring. Botathon Season 7 (“Keep on Trucking”) added an infrared laser-blaster mechanic, where bots lose lives when they’re hit and have to return to a station to recharge. The competition team shifted its near-term target from RoboMaster to the IEEE Region 5 autonomous challenge after DJI parts got caught up in tariffs. The club also started working alongside Engineers United, and picked up an old vending machine to refurbish.
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2026
Still building
Scrapp-E’s 3D-printed gearbox drove the tracks for the first time, and a working animatronic hand joined it. The club’s large-format Modix printer ran its first test print, a from-scratch arcade claw machine went into CAD, and a filament-recycling project got funded. The refurbished vending machine powered on and got stocked with the lab-day essentials students always forget. Botathon Season 8 is set for March, and the workshop lights are still on.
People who shaped the club
UNT Robotics runs on its members and an elected officer team. The earlier Robotics Club at UNT was led by Charles Bido and Robert Maxson. The 2018 revival was started by Sebastian King and Nick Tindle, with early officers including Juan Ruiz, Alex Ferguson, and Michelle Victoria. Joseph Moore founded the Aerospace and Rocketry division in 2021. Faculty advisors and mentors over the years have included Dr. Keathly, Dr. Hassan, and Mark Wasikowski, along with rocketry mentors Jack and Suzy Sprague. Guest speakers have included NASA engineer George Salazar, Dr. Amir Jafari of UNT’s Advanced Robotics Manipulators Lab, and roboticist Terrence Southern.