<p>Welcome to CURC's end-of-year wrap. This year, members hosted RoboCONN 2026, rebuilt robots from the ground up, debugged autonomy stacks, soldered PCBs, and sent combat robots into the arena.</p>

<h2>Who doesn't love some stats?</h2>
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    <img src="/news/year-wrap-2026/year-wrap-stats.png" alt="CURC year wrap statistics: 220+ RoboCONN participants, 25+ industry professionals, top 8 Combat Robotics finish, and #2 PacBot finish" />
</figure>

<h2>RoboCONN 2026</h2>
<p>RoboCONN 2026 was CURC's undergraduate robotics conference and showcase, hosted on April 25 at Earl Hall. The event gave students access to the kind of learning, networking, and industry exposure that is often limited to much larger conventions.</p>
<p>For CURC, the win was not just running a major event. The team showed that students can build technical, welcoming, and genuinely useful spaces for the next generation of engineers.</p>
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    <img src="/news/year-wrap-2026/year-wrap-roboconn.webp" alt="RoboCONN organizers and volunteers posing together in front of the RoboCONN banner" />
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<h2>PacBot</h2>
<p>PacBot returned to the maze with a smarter, smaller, cleaner robot. After spending most of the year building a more compact design with better modularity and stronger components, the team turned lessons from last year's competitions into a second-place finish at the 2026 PacBot competition at RIT.</p>
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    <img src="/news/year-wrap-2026/year-wrap-pacbot-1.webp" alt="PacBot team member testing the robot in a wooden maze" />
    <img src="/news/year-wrap-2026/year-wrap-pacbot-2.webp" alt="PacBot team members gathered for a meal after competition" />
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<h2>CCBR</h2>
<p>CCBR turned ambitious legged robotics into hardware. Over the year, the team constructed a quadruped robot from first principles, iterating on leg designs and building a chassis in collaboration with Rutgers and Caltech.</p>
<p>The finished quadruped is the team's first step toward a future humanoid robot: an open-source, modular platform built by students learning the hard parts together.</p>
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    <img src="/news/year-wrap-2026/year-wrap-ccbr.webp" alt="CCBR quadruped robot hardware on a lab floor" />
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<h2>Roboracer</h2>
<p>Roboracer focused on finalizing localization and path-planning systems, with localization working through SLAM Toolbox and AMCL alongside waypoint-based path planning. The team also built a custom web GUI for lighter-weight testing.</p>
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    <img src="/news/year-wrap-2026/year-wrap-roboracer.webp" alt="Roboracer autonomous vehicle hardware with onboard electronics" />
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<h2>AQUAS</h2>
<p>AQUAS refined its water-sampling and sensor-dashboard prototypes, started work on a treatment dispersal system, and began a microscopic species-detection model for an upcoming flowcam payload. The team also produced its first PCB, a power and solenoid board that tidies up the water-sampling electronics and makes the payload faster to reproduce.</p>
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    <img src="/news/year-wrap-2026/year-wrap-aquas.webp" alt="AQUAS team member soldering electronics for the water sampling payload" />
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<h2>Combat Robotics</h2>
<p>Combat Robotics had the kind of season recap that sounds like a sports movie with better weapons. ROAR-E struggled early, going 0-2 in October, then came roaring back in May to finish in the top 8 and earn a qualifying spot on NHRL's Pro Tour.</p>
<p>The team also built Tiny Tim, a 3 lb robot that came down to the wire, made it into the arena, and won a match. Next up: summer qualifiers, the Pro Tour, and an even bigger bench of bots, which could include more 3 lb robots and possibly a 30 lb build.</p>
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    <img src="/news/year-wrap-2026/year-wrap-combat.webp" alt="Combat Robotics 3 lb robot Tiny Tim on a white surface" />
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CURC closed the year with RoboCONN 2026, a second-place PacBot finish at RIT, a new CCBR quadruped, Combat Robotics wins, and steady progress across autonomy and hardware subteams.

News & Updates

CURC End-of-Year Wrap 2026