After many late nights, all-nighters and sneaking quick naps inside of the University of Texas at San Antonio’s Makerspace, a team of nine freshmen were named finalists in an international engineering competition.
Last fall, they entered the competition seeking to solve a real world problem.
They came up with RoboRowdy. It’s an autonomous robot designed for small and medium-sized 3D print farms to automate the process of part removal, build-plate cleaning and print restarts to increase efficiency and minimize errors.
The team of 18- and 19-year-old first-year UTSA students is one of only three global finalists at the 2026 Siemens Immersive Design Challenge, and the only team representing the United States.
“I wanted to find young, aspiring engineers to turn a project into a reality,” said Jacob White, 19, a mechanical engineering student who helped form the team last fall.
Even as a freshman, White had already been working with Siemens over the summer doing software development, a job he has maintained and now works in design and simulation. That’s how he found out about this challenge.
Israel Elizondo, 19, also a mechanical engineering major, was tapped by White to help bring the team together and they agreed on two prerequisites: all freshman and multidisciplinary.
“Freshmen would get the opportunity to get extra hands-on experience,” Elizondo said. “We also wanted it to be multidisciplinary, instead of just having all engineering [students] with the same kind of perspective, we wanted well-rounded perspectives.”
The pitch resonated well with Vian Chen, 18, and Dyshana Torres Rivera, 18, both computer science majors; Andrew Romo, 18, Darik Ptratt, 19, and Jiseo Chon, 18, also mechanical engineering majors; Roman Benavides, 19, a biomedical engineering major, and Gray Samaniego, 19, a business major.
They said that they all knew it would be a big time investment, but they wanted to be part of something they could be proud of and set the tone for the rest of their college experience.
The worldwide challenge, hosted by Siemens and Sony, asked students to utilize immersive engineering to make a product or a process more sustainable.
The students were among the nearly 2,000 participants who entered the competition by submitting their ideas in writing. The team was then among the 54 teams from 44 universities to advance to Round 2, where they had to create a prototype or visualization to present their products using a short video.
Building the prototypes was an optional aspect of the competition. But the students reached out to various UTSA departments and organizations, who helped them fundraise and about $12,000 to build RoboRowdy.
Through the design, modeling and building process the team learned many lessons, they said, from how to better structure it, from painting and cleaning parts that were showing signs of wear-and-tear, to adjusting the design for it to be more adaptive.
The robot is engineered to read ArUco markers, or codes, to find its place and complete its task, but parts can be adjusted to complete multiple tasks without having to replace the entire unit.
“It can be used for multiple applications, not just 3D print farms,” team lead Elizondo said. “What’s really cool is that our end effector is a module… we can switch to any other design. It’s really something that’s efficient, sustainable and modular.”
Their final prototype has interchangeable parts, specifically the device attached to the end of the robotic arm that allows the robot to perform other tasks if needed.
With this prototype the team advanced to Round 3 of the competition.
“In Round 3 what we have to do is essentially do a presentation in front of a VIP panel, and that is our big business case on why our product is sustainable, why our product works and why our product should be chosen as the winner,” Samaniego said.
Later this month, on May 28, Team 210 Robotics will join the other two finalists from México and the UK, in a virtual meeting to sell their team, idea and design before a Siemens executive team who will then select the winning team. The teams will also be flown out to Detroit, Michigan, for the Realize Live 2026 conference.
This early success also led White to start 210 Robotics, a robotics organization at UTSA, with the support of his teammates and the goal of entering other challenges and expanding their reach.
“We wanted to spread the success throughout the university,” White said. “It’s going to be a multipurpose robotics organization here at UTSA. And it’s going to be competing in VEX U, which is a competitive robotics organization meant to give college students engineering avenues and introduce them into the world of robotics.”
The San Antonio Report partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.
