Robocon 2025 — Team Phoenix
Two competition robots. Forty engineers. One fixed deadline.
Team Phoenix’s entry in DD Robocon 2025 — two basketball-playing robots on one base, and the control software and simulation behind both.
What it does
40+ engineers across three sub-teams, from design review to arena testing
Owned the autonomy architecture: vision ball detection, SLAM localisation, motion planning
ESP32 → ROS 2 joystick bridge with a documented serial protocol
Flywheel shooter with motorised angle adjustment and servo trim
Published simulation proof alongside the competition code
On camera
Watch the film
Team Phoenix — the challenge, the shooter, match day · 1:58, with sound.
The long version
Robocon 2025 asked for robots that could play basketball against another team in real time. Two machines had to be built in parallel — one teleoperated, one fully autonomous — on one shared drive base, one shared electronics design, and a schedule that ended on competition day whether the robots were ready or not.
My part was the technical direction: deciding what the autonomy stack would look like, splitting it across the mechanical, electronics, and software sub-teams, and running the loop from design review through arena testing. The hardest calls were about scope — which capability to cut so the rest would be reliable under a match clock.
On the teleoperation side, an ESP32 reads joystick axes and buttons and publishes them into ROS 2 over a documented serial bridge, driving four-wheel control, a flywheel shooter, a motorised angle stage, and a servo for fine trim. The autonomous side layers vision-based ball detection and SLAM arena localisation on the same base, with Nav2 replanning around opposing robots.