Tennessee Tech’s robotics teams earned two global awards during their third consecutive appearance at the 2026 VEX Robotics World Championship.
Autonomous Robotics Club President Coby Smith said the organization sent two qualifying teams to the three-day international competition to compete in an engineering-based game. Smith said the club expanded to three teams this year to accommodate a large influx of new members.
“It takes a lot of skill, especially to be in these situations where you’re facing against other universities, to be in these qualifying eliminating matches, Smith said. “So you’re really in these high-stress situations where you gotta rely on driving the robot, making sure that you are keeping up with the opponents.”
Smith said the club’s most competitive team earned the Build Award, recognizing a robot capable of withstanding physical contact from opponents while utilizing advanced materials. He said a second Tennessee Tech team received the Innovate Award for incorporating unique mechanisms or designs not found in other robots at the championship.
“I ended up finding a community in this club, ended up finding people like-minded like I was and I figured out hey, robotics is the area I want to go into,” Smith said. “That’s what I want to do just because of the people, of how you’re able to apply your engineering concepts, you know, you could do one thing in the classroom, but then you can actually apply it, put it in real life, and get to visually see it move and actually get to see what you’re working on.”
Smith said the club operates through specialized sectors including design, coding, and building teams that must collaborate to produce a functional machine. He said the multidisciplinary group includes computer science, mechanical engineering, and business majors, as well as students studying geology, communications, and political science.
“Engineering is all about collaboration,” Smith said. “It’s not just, ‘Oh, what can I do?’ It’s what can we do as a team. Me personally, I’m computer science. So I’m doing programming work, I talk to designers and say, ‘Hey, what are you designing? How can I develop a program that will work with what you’re designing?’”
Smith said the competition matches last only two minutes, requiring high-pressure coordination between drivers and team members who track time and provide verbal navigation. He said the club applied lessons learned from previous years when they did not win awards to improve their designs for this season.
“We’ve definitely taken the time to, you know, make sure our club is long-lasting,” Smith said. “We love actually mentoring new students, especially, like I said, our teams were built from having super competitive people to people with no knowledge whatsoever because we really care about having others succeed because you succeed when others succeed.”
The club recently hosted its first high school robotics tournament at Tennessee Tech, which drew 32 teams from 14 different schools to the campus. Smith said the club also participates in career days at local elementary and middle schools to provide community outreach and introduce younger students to engineering.
“Hopefully you know next year we will get to go to the robotics championship and maybe win the entire championship next year,” Smith said.