Fifteen. That’s the age my brain kinda short-circuited and got totally sucked into the world of fight robots. I was stressed, my head was spinning with all the new stuff, but the moment I stepped into that workshop? I was hooked. My school seniors had just begun Invincible Robotics, and I was unable to look away from their machines cutting through plywood as if it were freaking paper. Six years have passed, and now I'm 21 years old, the same awed kid who somehow ended up being a two-time World Cup winner with the same group of legends.
Invincible Robotics? Began with essentially nothing but this mad enthusiasm and whatever odds and ends we could scrounge up around the place. Just sort of smashed our way through the 15kg and 30kg divisions, learning by trial and error. Then we added the high-speed 8kg arena to the mix – that was an entirely new ballgame, all about speed, accelerating like mad, and responding in an instant. Each class hurled its own quirky issues at us, and I just. enjoyed trying to solve them.
The largest, most hurtful lesson early on? Being cool won't get you anywhere if your robot can't even take a punch. We'd construct these guns we thought were gonna get us everything, and then they'd just. break the first time they impacted anything. I spent months simply learning why things break, how the force works, and why armor doesn't just exist for appearance's sake – it's really the entire strategy. All of the pieces had to earn their weight. Eventually we did. And when we did, it actually held together.
My "aha!" moment was when I stopped just worrying about the cool, flashy stuff and began to get into the not-so-cool aspects of robotics: getting things ridiculously strong, being able to repair things ridiculously quickly when they broke (because they always did), and making snap judgments when your robot's getting smashed. Between battles, we were essentially rebuilding from scratch in minutes. I really got into making wire setups that just plugged in, armor that you could swap out really fast, and having backups for when the main thing decided to die. Creating something that looked cool was nice and all. Creating something that could actually live? That was much more better.
We also dived headfirst into the electronics side of things. I wasted years just designing battery packs that wouldn't burst into flames when you demanded a million amps out of them, creating these teeny brain machines out of ESP32s to monitor everything, and calibrating the motor controllers so that we could get really, really fine control even when things were moving utterly lunatically. We wrung every last ounce of juice from our bots – not merely for power or speed, but so they wouldn't croak on us and so we could debug what was amiss if they did. To win wasn't to have the largest motor; it was to have all the systems play nicely together without a tantrum.
And then the nutty highlight – two World Cup victories, consecutive ones at that. Those are just seared into my head: the stand, the last blows, just being totally shell-shocked when our bot remained upright and the other one was a heap of parts. All the sleeplessness, the wrecked pieces, the minute little adjustments no one else probably even caught – all worth it. Twice. It's hard to even explain how it feels, but "surreal" is probably close.
Working at Invincibles ? We each have our own bizarre design quirks and favorite ideas, but when it's time to go, it all works, everyone clicks. One guy floors it like his life is on the line, another is yelling out what to do, somebody else has a soldering iron at the ready before the bot even stops. No egos, just trust.
And of course, there's still IIT Bombay – the one we've yet to win. We've come so damn close – so close it makes your stomach hit the floor – but it always seems to get away like sand. The tournament that still pops into our minds late at night and drives us every bit as much as it drives us crazy. The final boss. And we're far from finished trying.
Looking back at all this, it’s been about way more than just trophies or wins. It’s been about the stuff you only learn when things go completely wrong, the late-night arguments about which motor is better, the burned fingers from rushing a solder joint, and those quiet moments when something you built with your own hands just… works. It's about this group of individuals who've sacrificed far too much for this stupid dream of steel, sparks, and getting things to move.
Invincible Robotics did not merely instruct me on how to construct combat robots. It instructed me on how to truly think, how to solve things when all hell's breaking loose, and how to construct something truly amazing with a group of individuals who are just as passionate about this kind of thing as I am.