Two Students, Two Self-Built Robots, And A 9th-Place Finish At The Robot 'World Cup'

Two school students from India, working as a team of two, sent a pair of robots to play soccer against the best in the world this year, and finished ninth. Kushal Sachdeva and Darsh Goel, who compete under the name VVS Ballers, placed ninth in the RoboCupJunior Soccer Infrared category at RoboCup 2026, the international robotics championship held in Incheon, South Korea. What makes the result striking is less the number than who earned it: not a well-funded lab or a large school squad, but two teenagers who designed, wired, built and programmed the machines themselves.

A game robots must play on their own

RoboCup is one of the world's largest and longest-running robotics competitions, drawing student and research teams from dozens of countries every year. Its junior division, RoboCupJunior, runs a soccer league in which small wheeled robots play two-a-side matches. Crucially, they play autonomously: there is no remote control and no joystick, so once the referee starts the match, each robot has to sense the game and decide what to do entirely on its own, with no human input until the whistle.

The Infrared category (until recently called the Lightweight league) adds a particular twist. The ball is not an ordinary ball but one that emits infrared light: invisible radiation just past the red end of the spectrum, which the robots pick up with specialised sensors rather than a normal camera. On a green field marked with white lines, a goal counts only when the ball is driven all the way to the back wall of the net, and touching a wall or driving fully into the marked penalty box draws an out-of-bounds penalty that pulls the robot off the field for a full minute. For 2026 the league also switched to a smaller 42-millimetre infrared "golf ball," which the team had to re-tune its sensors around. Within those rules, the whole game reduces to one hard problem: finding the ball, chasing it, and putting it in the goal without straying over the lines.

Two robots, two jobs

VVS Ballers is a genuinely two-person effort. Sachdeva leads the team and owns the electronics and custom circuit boards, the software, and much of the computer-aided design; Goel handles the mechanical design and shares the CAD work.

The team fields two robots, built to the same design but handed different jobs. One plays as an attacker; the other plays as a defender, or goalkeeper. Both share the same chassis and the same electronics, and what separates them is simply the software running on the main controller. The attacker's task is to win the ball, line up a shot and score. The goalkeeper is to sit across the mouth of the goal, track the ball as it moves, and clear it away, all while riding the edge of the penalty area rather than straying inside it, which the rules forbid.

Five boards and a solenoid

Under the shell, each robot is not one computer but several. The team split the work across five custom-designed circuit boards (the flat boards, etched with copper wiring, that carry a robot's electronics), with each board handling one job and reporting to a central "main" board. That main board is built around a Teensy 4.1 microcontroller, a small, fast single-chip computer, and it drives the wheels and triggers the kicker. A dedicated sensor board carries a ring of sixteen infrared receivers that together work out the direction of the ball. Another reads a set of downward-facing sensors that catch the white boundary lines; a third pings the surrounding walls using ultrasonic sensors, the same echo-ranging trick behind car parking sensors; and a power board produces the various voltages the robot needs.

Two more pieces complete the picture. A small forward-facing camera, an OpenMV vision module, hunts for the goal and any keeper in the way, so the attacker can aim for the open corner instead of the centre. An inertial sensor, the kind of orientation chip found in a smartphone, lets the robot hold a straight heading as it moves. All four wheels are omni-directional wheels: wheels studded with smaller rollers that let the robot slide sideways or diagonally without turning its body, so it can dart in any direction while still facing forward. And to shoot, the attacker uses a solenoid: an electromagnet that snaps a metal plunger forward to strike the ball, run here at 48 volts, the maximum the competition rules allow, for the hardest legal kick.

Built from scratch

Designing circuit boards from the ground up, writing the firmware that runs on each one, 3D-printing the mechanical parts and getting two robots to coordinate is a tall order for a team of two, and the project's documentation is candid about the iteration involved, even keeping a running list of known limitations and fixes. The pair came up through the Indian regional and national rounds (their records include a trophy and finals footage from the national event) before reaching the international championship.

Ninth in the world

For a self-built, two-person team from India, a ninth-place finish at a world final is a real result. RoboCup draws serious teams from around the globe, many of them larger and better resourced, so a top-ten placing means the two robots held up under genuine match pressure against the best juniors in the sport, the kind of outcome that usually rewards far bigger operations.

The team has published its designs, the boards, the code and the mechanical files, openly on GitHub for others to build on, an unusually generous move in a field where most guard their work. Whether next season brings a new build or a run at a different title, VVS Ballers has shown that two students with a soldering iron, a 3D printer and a lot of persistence can put India in the top ten of one of the toughest events in student robotics, with room still to climb.

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