On Feb. 4, the College’s robotics club, the “Cattlebots,” entered its first competition, the VEX U college and university competition, hosted at Vaughn College of Aeronautics and Technology in New York City. The Cattlebots competed against eight other schools — the majority of which were engineering universities — and won second place.
At the competition, robots competed in a soccer-like game to score against their competitors. Among these were two robots built by the Cattlebots. After the game, if the robots successfully completed elevation and self-driving challenges, teams earned an opportuniy to engineer more complex mechanisms that could make or break their final scores.
Estefany Lopez-Velazquez ’25, who is a physics major, founded Cattlebots during the summer of 2022 while researching under Professor of Physics Graham Giovannetti, who serves as the club’s advisor. “I started the club here because I really missed robotics,” Lopez-Velazquez told the Record.
The club welcomes members from all backgrounds and levels of experience, Lopez-Velazquez said.
Lopez-Velazquez’s passion for robotics has continued to grow since she started a robotics club in seventh grade, she said.
Coming from what she described as an underfunded high school, located in a small town in Mississippi, Lopez-Velazquez and her teammates had to learn the ins and outs of robotics from each other and YouTube tutorials. For that reason, she said, she was particularly excited to found a robotics club using the College’s resources. “I remember talking to [my seventh-grade teacher] about how frustrated I would get [with an] obvious disparity of resources,” she said.
In high school, Lopez-Velazquez’s robotics team was mostly composed of female students of color — deviating from the male-dominated robotics field. “When we would go to competitions, I noticed that it would mostly be just white men, aside from the Girl Scouts team,” Lopez-Velazquez said. “That’s when I started realizing that there was a lack of representation of minorities within [this] field.”
This realization fueled her dedication to start a more inclusive club at the College, she said. “It’s something that I carry with me always, and it’s something that I thought about a lot when I started the club,” she said. “I do really try to make our club at Williams a safe space.”
In interviews with the Record, members of the club highlighted their appreciation for the opportunity to pursue robotics in a welcoming environment. “When I came to Williams and heard about the club, I signed up as soon as possible,” said Valeria Lopez ’26, who now serves as the club’s engineering notebook coordinator, designing and monitoring the robot’s progress.
According to Lopez, more than half of the nine-member team did not have any prior experience in robotics before joining the club. “I’d say that the environment is pretty welcoming, and you usually learn things on the spot,” she said.
As a result, members of the group collaborate to learn from each other, which most of the time involves trial and error. “Our work is with our hands and we tend to try a bunch of different things until something works,” Lopez said. “[That means] taking things apart and starting from zero.”
Lopez said that despite the College’s resources, finding funding for robotics equipment has remained a challenge for the team. “We have a lot of ideas but most of the time we either get rejections from school funding sources or have to wait two to three weeks for funds and equipment to get to us,” she said. “At the beginning, we didn’t even have a big enough space. It wasn’t until our advisor [Graham Giovanetti] found a bigger space that we could fully start and thrive.”
Lopez-Velazquez echoed a similar sentiment. “Our biggest support has been Professor Graham Giovanetti,” she said. “He advocated for us when we were struggling to find a room and checked in with us about the progress of the club.”
Tashrique Ahmed ’26, who is the chair of the club’s Building and Strategy Team, shared the importance of access to resources at the College. “The main issue that I faced back home [in Bangladesh] when I did robotics was not having enough resources because we had to do everything from scratch,” Ahmed said.
Although the club does not organize a formal introduction to robotics, each member learns through test-driving the robots. When training, Ahmed said, the club relies on pursuing answers to exploratory questions.
The club has built two robots from scratch, with which they entered the VEX U competition. The club also voluntarily attends high school robotics competitions as judges to learn and implement better methods in their robot-building processes.
Right now, the majority of the club consists of first-year students. “The robotics community at Williams is composed of many incredibly passionate students,” Liz Mirra de Carvalho Rachid ’27, another member of the club building team, wrote in an email to the Record. “We hope to show Williams how fascinating [it] is to work with robotics.”
Lopez-Velazquez, who is also a Junior Advisor to the Class of 2027, said her favorite aspect of the club is hanging out with the first-years, including some from her entry, and seeing them develop connections through building robots. Their biggest accomplishment from the competition, Lopez-Velazquez said, was not their second-place finish, but rather the team bonding while they were in New York City, like when the team surprised Rachid — who is in Lopez-Velazquez’s entry — with a cake and tacos on her birthday.
Ahmed said that no matter how much planning goes into building a robot, there is always unpredictability within competitive robotics — which is when teams build robots from scratch for the sole purpose of entering the competitions. This unpredictability makes competitions especially exciting, he said. “There’s a lot of learning that happens in those moments,” Ahmed said. “Although it takes time and our club is pretty young, we’re glad that we [placed second at] the first competition we went to.”
