Slugbotics

Day 1 at Open Sauce!

Thank you so much for sending us 2 4090s! We greatly appreciate your support of our club and our Autonomous Vehicle subteam! Special thanks to .ceo, Zvi, and Ankit for helping us get the compute power to do our simulations!

Donate to Slugbotics for Spring Give 2024 starting April 3rd! Our sub teams are working hard to design new bots and we would love your support to make our dreams come true!

Thank you for sponsoring NorCal Knockout! With their help, we hosted bots and builders from all over California, and even some flying in from Arizona and Nevada! They’re your source for Competitive and Hobby Robot Parts!

Shout-out to for supporting NorCal Knockout on January 27th, a full day of bot fighting in the forests of UC Santa Cruz!

Slugbotics has taught valuable skills to countless students in the past. The opportunities we provide allow students to find and cultivate their love of engineering. We need your support to ensure this year is a success! Engineering is expensive so every dollar counts! Donate to slugbotics today and empower the future engineers of America!

https://givingday.ucsc.edu/giving-day/78095/department/78295

Slugbotics wins 2nd place at UCLA SoCal Smackdown 2023

Slugbotics is hosting a combat robotics competition, NorCal Smackdown on February 4th at Baskin Courtyard from 8am to 6pm. It is open to the public and free to attend, so come check it out on Feb 4th!

Today is Giving Day!

Slugbotics would love your support and generosity today so we can purchase tools and supplies to teach new members and get ready for competitions coming up this year!

To learn more about giving day and Slugbotics, visit this link:

UCSC Giving Day 2022 Support student success during Giving Day at UC Santa Cruz!

Slugbotics, is asking for your support this Giving Day, November 2nd!

Slugbotics is a no-cost to students nonprofit organization which allows UC Santa Cruz students to develop hands-on technical, leadership, and financial skills with little to no barrier to entry. Current projects include underwater robotics, combat robotics, aviation robotics, and modular robotics.

Thank you for considering supporting Slugbotics!

To learn more about Slugbotics, check out:
https://givingday.ucsc.edu/giving-day/58746/department/58829

Here are some projects Slugbotics will be doing this year!

MATE: marine-grade ROV
Combat Robotics: 15 1lb combat robots
SOMARS: Swarm technology for drones
F1TENTH: Miniature autonomous race car

Learn more about Slugbotics is doing on our website, slugbotics.com

Slugbotics won 2nd place at a UCLA-hosted combat robotics tournament! 16 teams competed in this 3lb bot competition. Our bot, Record Scratch, was made from high-quality materials such as Carbon Fiber, glass-reinforced nylon, and TPU.

We are working very hard to assemble our ROV to compete in the MATE Competition at Monterey Bay!

Meet this year’s f1tenth team! This is one of our sub teams who works on creating an autonomous race car that is 1/10 in scale to and F1 car!

Meet the claw and Dustpan Dave, this is our designed solutions for the The claw will be used to move pieces of 1/2 in PVC pipes and dustpan Dave will be collecting dead (rubber) fish and putting it in a basket!

Had a great team bonding experience at our Trivia Night with !

Slugbotics is now doing Combat Robotics!
Our first bot battle competition will be in Sacramento on Feb 26th, we are very excited to compete!

Slugbotics finished our onboarding last week! Here are some of the final projects our members created for their onboarding class. Next quarter we will be working on our various projects!

Save the date! UC Santa Cruz’s 6th annual Giving Day is November 3rd. Slugbotics needs your help to raise money for our MATE and F1/10 competitions! Link in bio!

Want to gain engineering experience while also having fun and meeting new people remotely? Join Slugbotics, UCSC’s competitive robotics team!

Slugbotics is a student organization focused on hands-on engineering that you won’t find in a lecture hall. We design Underwater ROVs for the MATE robotics competition (https://materovcompetition.org), and self-driving 1/10 scale racecars for F1TENTH (https://f1tenth.org/). Despite COVID-19, both of these competitions are being held, and we’re doing our best to make joining the team a valuable experience during this time.

In Fall quarter, we hold “onboarding” classes, where we teach all the skills you need to contribute to the team, and for the first time ever, we’re able to offer this as a 3-unit university course. In Winter and Spring, we start designing our ROV and programming the racecar. You can join different sub-teams that focus on CAD, machining, electronics/PCB design, low-level systems, or advanced programming.

To sign up for Slugbotics, go to https://slugbotics.com for instructions to join our Slack workspace. We’re hosting two informational meetings on Wednesday the 30th at 3:20pm and Saturday the 3rd at 6pm. Both meetings have the same content, you should only attend one. We’ll also be at CORNUCOPIA and the Baskin Welcome Students Event if you want more info, both on the 30th. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below, and we hope to see you soon!

meeting links:
Wednesday: https://calendar.google.com/event?action=TEMPLATE&tmeid=Nmo2bHZnOHU2NjJxcnM3YTZia3ZocnBuNnQgdWNzYy5lZHVfOWp0ZG5xaDQwbWt1ZnVtdDk0YWduZm8zOXNAZw&tmsrc=ucsc.edu_9jtdnqh40mkufumt94agnfo39s%40group.calendar.google.com

Saturday: https://calendar.google.com/event?action=TEMPLATE&tmeid=M3J1aDYxb3UwaDI1NTFwYm5yYWppbzVnczcgdWNzYy5lZHVfOWp0ZG5xaDQwbWt1ZnVtdDk0YWduZm8zOXNAZw&tmsrc=ucsc.edu_9jtdnqh40mkufumt94agnfo39s%40group.calendar.google.com

slugbotics.com

We're very thankful to everyone who contributed and helped Slugbotics this year. We assembled a great team, and we had just finished building our ROV frame before the workspace was closed due to COVID-19.

While we won't be able to participate in the competitions this year, we're making progress on other projects (remotely) and preparing to get back to work once this is all over. See you soon!

Slugbotics updated their business hours.

Join Slugbotics at CORNUCOPIA! We’re UCSC’s competitive marine robotics team, and we're recruiting this week.

Our main project is the MATE competition (https://www.marinetech.org/rov-competition), where we design, fabricate, and program an underwater ROV from scratch. Last year, we competed in the international competition in Kingsport, Tennessee, and we intend to qualify again this year, with your help.

New this year, we’re also starting a team to compete in Formula 1/10 (http://www.f1tenth.org), an autonomous racecar competition, in collaboration with UCSC’s Cyber-Physical Systems Research Center. F1/10 is a great opportunity for more advanced programmers to learn to work with technologies like LIDAR and computer vision.

No prior experience is required to join Slugbotics. During fall quarter, we hold onboarding sessions to get everyone up to speed in topics like CAD (with Solidworks), PCB design (with Autodesk EAGLE), and coding in C. We hope to see you at CORNUCOPIA today, and at other events throughout welcome week. If you have any other questions, or want to join the team but can’t come to the event, DM this page or email [email protected]. You can also find more information about the team at https://slugbotics.com/pages/join.html

We had a great time at the MATE International Competition in Tennessee! We met teams from all over the world, and even collaborated with a few of them. Scores are yet to be released, but no matter what, we'll definitely be returning and we have a lot of work to do. @ Tennessee

Donate to Slugbotics!
Wednesday is Giving Day at UCSC! Giving Day is a 24-hour fundraising event in which student organizations from around campus compete to earn unique donors and raise the most money over the 24 hour period.
Our goal this Giving Day is to win the “Happy Hour" bonus. In order to get this reward, we need to get the highest number of individual/unique donations between 3pm and 4pm.
This year, our goal is to raise $15,000, which will cover the cost of building our 2019 robot, transportation, and allow us to fund many other interesting projects and community outreach!
Please donate at slugbotics.com/donate. Even the minimum donation of $10 will go a long way towards getting us bonus funding from the University. Your donations will also be matched by UCSC’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, doubling your impact.
Your donation is greatly appreciated, and we couldn't do everything we do without your help.

Slugbotics: Marine Robotics at UCSC We are a group of students interested in robotics and in building a scientific ROV and an autonomous scale race car to compete in international robotics competitions.

Interested in hands-on engineering? Check out Slugbotics, UCSC’s marine robotics team. Find us at OPERS fair, go to our team website (slugbotics.com), or come to our introductory meeting this Saturday at 2pm in The Similarium (E2-180).

This is the one announcement we were hoping we’d never have to make. We won’t be able to go to competition this year.

The team worked hard over the last month and a half to complete our ROV, and during the process of pool testing, numerous onboard systems failed, including the exterior cameras, optical USB cable, and power delivery connectors. Thankfully, we were able to spot these before any serious damage was done to the ROV or the onboard electronics.

Unfortunately, this means we were unable to meet a deadline set by MATE.
As a college-division team, we had to submit a video by May 11 showing that the ROV worked and could complete some of the competition tasks. Due to the aforementioned failures, we were unable to complete the video on time and didn’t qualify for the competition in June.

While this is devastating to us, we are optimistic about next year. We plan to spend the rest of this quarter planning for the future, as well as repairing and improving our current ROV, eventually turning it into a testbed for new tools and components. We anticipate having far more interest in our team next year, and will be able to start building significantly earlier, having already gone through the process of establishing the team. With our current members, knowledge, and the support of the community, we have a solid foundation for the 2019 MATE competition and school year.