From April 15th to April 19th , Theseus Robotics competed at the 2025 FTC World Championships in Houston, Texas. After winning Inspire 3 at the Australian National Championship back in December, we were determined to do well on the world stage.
In the leadup to worlds, we reached out to our local community, hosting multiple outreach events at schools and local libraries, whilst also meeting with world-class FTC teams worldwide and exchanging design ideas and advice.
Our Robot
We wanted to do something that had never been done before in FTC, creating a innovate robot design that was able to split into 5 seperate parts - a level of modularity that was never before seen. Many key subsystems of our robot were fastened with zipties and magnets!
On our arrival into Houston, we met up with other teams attending the World Championship - 12993 Robokings Aurum and 18763 Texpand, gaining valuable experience practicing with them at a local school.
Throughout our stay in Houston, we met and made friends with so many teams, including 25631 Proxima Nova, 11212 The Clueless, 19411 Tech Tigers and many more. Being apart of an international community which was so welcoming and friendly to a rookie team like Theseus was a really amazing experience.
Theseus at Competition
In the qualification matches at worlds, we went 5-5 in our matches, with many of the matches being plagued by mechanical and software issues. That being said, we were proud to pull off some upsets in the rankings when our robot did perform, sending the 1st and 2nd ranked teams down by beating them in the qualifiers.
However, despite our admittedly sub-par robot reliability, we were awarded the 1st Place Innovate Award for best robot design in the Franklin Division, which was a huge achievement for us as a rookie team.
The Future of Theseus
After worlds, numerous members of Theseus retired to focus on studies as they were in the final year of high school. The co-founder of Theseus and lead robot designer, Josh, stepped away from the team to focus on business opportunities elsewhere. His contribution was truly invaluable to the team, and we were all extremely proud of the hard work that he put in. Two other members of the team, Banjo — the inventor of the infamous Vision Normalisation Module and Henry — the man who made us known at Worlds with his amazing outreach skills, also stepped away to focus on school.
However, the story of Theseus’ Into The Deep Season is not over! We attended the Asia-Pacific Championship in July, with a significantly reworked robot that aimed to fix all of the issues we were having at Worlds. Stay tuned for our next blog post!
Not only that, Theseus is excited to announce that we will be returning for the 2025-2026 season, DECODE, with the next generation of STEM engineers and a new robot design that will be revealed in the coming months. We are excited to continue our journey in FTC and to see what the future holds for us.
Again, a special shoutout to all of the teams that we met at Worlds that made Theseus’ first season such an unforgettable one - 12993, 18763, 25631, 23521, 11212, 8617 & many more.
This journey would not have been possible without our sponsors and donors. Theseus Robotics would like to sincerely thank all of our supporters in funding our mission in furthering the reach of STEM in Australia, and around the world.