RPI Robotics Club receives $50,000 endowment

The Robotics Club at RPI started in 2021 and officially began operations as a club in Spring 2022, affiliated with Student Union but without receiving funding. Their first major funding was through fundraising and receiving a major grant of $10,000 through the National Havoc Robot League, a combat robotics competition. Additional funding for the club came from the Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering Department and the Center for Automated Technologies and Systems (CATS) at RPI.

This year marks a transformative moment for the club with the establishment of a new endowment from Head of ECSE Dr. John Wen and his wife Deborah Miele-Wen, long-time advocates for hands-on robotics education at RPI. The endowment provides a $10,000 immediate-use gift along with a $50,000 fund that will generate approximately $2,500 annually to support competitions, prototyping, and future student-led initiatives. During the announcement, Dean of Engineering Dr. Shekhar Garde emphasized Dr. Wen’s extraordinary leadership within the university, describing him as someone whose “inner compass always points true north.” The gift is but an extension of the same principles that have defined Dr. Wen’s service to RPI for decades.

The club plans to use the endowment to strengthen and expand its growing portfolio of student-led projects. With seven active teams, the club will direct resources toward supporting ongoing work such as the Intelligent Ground Vehicle team, which is preparing for competition and requires significant computational and hardware investment. The funds will also help students pursue new ideas, whether personal builds or research extensions, through a formal proposal and review process. Beyond existing efforts, the endowment will allow the club to scale the total number of projects, support its role in hosting the VEX Robotics Competition for high school students, collaborate more deeply with the MercerX lab and The Forge, and provide an accessible entry point for students of all majors and experience levels. This level of engagement and interest in robotics at RPI has also encouraged, according to Dr. Wen, introducing a "robotics engineering degree program," with the first cohort coming in Fall 2026.