Most college freshmen spend their first year finding their footing. They’re navigating new classes, a new campus and a new chapter of life.
Nine UT San Antonio freshmen have been moving up the ranks in a design competition that pits them against upperclassmen, graduate students and PhD candidates from universities across the globe.
The team of engineering, computer science and business students is one of 54 selected from more than 1,900 participants in the Siemens Immersive Design Challenge. The event is a global competition for students to make a product or process more sustainable using immersive engineering — combining the digital and physical world.
They earned their spot alongside teams from Arizona State, Clemson, Georgia Tech, Princeton and Texas A&M, among others. There are 20 universities from India, plus teams from Australia, Pakistan and the African continent.
A different kind of farming
The team’s project, called RoboRowdy, targets 3D printing farms. It’s a sector with market value projected to climb from $23.41 billion in 2025 to $101.74 billion by 2032. Yet despite that growth, the day-to-day operation of large-scale 3D print farms depends heavily on manual labor.
“A 3D print farm is just a massive number of printers, all with different tasks and different orders,” said Israel Elizondo, project lead and mechanical engineering student. “It takes around one or two people for 20 to 30 printers. The average printer remains idle for over seven hours a day — that’s a waste of materials, energy, and, most importantly, time. And in this stage, what is time if not money?”
Existing solutions — gravity-assisted removal systems, robotic arms, track-restricted robots — address parts of the problem, but none scale across an entire print farm. That is exactly where RoboRowdy comes in.
“It doesn’t matter what year you are in college. If you want something bad enough and you’re willing to put in the time, the effort, and the drive, then you can really accomplish anything. Anyone can do this — it’s just how bad do you want it?” — Israel Elizondo
The fully autonomous robot receives a notification when a print job is complete, navigates to the printer, aligns itself, removes the finished part, cleans the build plate and nozzle and restarts the next print job — all without human intervention. It also monitors for errors, stopping and resetting a print when something goes wrong. The design is built for scalability, meaning a large facility could deploy multiple RoboRowdy units across hundreds of machines.
Forming a team
Jacob White, a mechanical engineering major and the team’s student ambassador worked one summer at Siemens and brought the competition to his teammates’ attention. White and Elizondo began assembling a team with a deliberate goal: keep it all freshmen.
“We wanted this to be something that is just a group of freshmen, because freshmen don’t really get hands-on experience this early,” Elizondo said. “A lot of internships don’t even hire freshmen. We wanted to do something that not only lets us translate what we learned in the classroom, but something we can get experience from and ultimately be proud of doing.”
The team came together in the Honors College’s Guadalupe Hall. It grew into a deliberately multidisciplinary group: Andrew Romo, Darik Pratt and Jiseo Chon are three more mechanical engineering students. Dyshana Torres Rivera and Vian Chen are computer science majors. Roman Benavides majors in biomedical engineering and Gray Samiengo majors in actuarial science and mathematics.
The team has been at it since November 2025.
Moving to round two
The team is now tasked with building a full-scale physical prototype to validate their CAD models, refining their 3D simulations, producing a video showcasing their team and concept and answering a detailed set of 11 questions from the competition organizers.
Only five teams will advance to round 3. Those teams will have access to Sony VR headsets, allowing them to interact with their CAD models in a fully immersive virtual environment. The top three finishers earn invitations to Realize Live 2026, Siemens’ annual convention that draws the top 100 global technology companies. Team members would receive internship offers, the university would receive a one-year license to Siemens’ NX software and each winning school would receive Sony XR headsets.
The team expects to learn their round two fate by mid-April.
Larger lessons learned
Elizondo said lessons from this project extend beyond CAD models and robot mechanics.
“This was really one of my first big leadership roles,” he said. “I’ve definitely grown in my leadership and communication skills. I talk weekly with faculty and high-ranking university officials and have comfortable conversations with them, something I couldn’t have done a couple of months ago. Not only my engineering skills have improved, but also my soft skills.”
But it hasn’t been easy, balancing the competition with a full freshman course load.
“There’s a lot that we’re trying to do,” Elizondo said. “It’s definitely hard to balance the time it takes — from 3D modeling to building to answering questions and doing research — with just our regular classes.”
But for a student who grew up convincing his parents to drive him to the Houston Space Center and Kennedy Space Center in Florida because of a childhood fascination with rockets, the drive to push through seems to come naturally. Elizondo counts aerospace — SpaceX, Boeing, NASA — among his long-term goals.
“It doesn’t matter what year you are in college,” he said. “If you want something bad enough and you’re willing to put in the time, the effort, and the drive, then you can really accomplish anything. Anyone can do this — it’s just how bad do you want it?”
Hear how the UT San Antonio robotics team designed Robo Rowdy.
