Chubby Unicode
Check out Tim's NHRL interview in December 2025.
Tim Hebert, head of the Automation Lab, develops robots for NHRL, a competitive combat robotics league. Best known for Chubby Unicorn, a robot with over 50 fights and 30 wins, Tim has recently expanded into trying new designs. One of these directions is “Chubby Unicode,” an experimental project that replaces a human driver with a machine learning framework that determines how the robot moves and fights. As an initial step, Tim has experimented with unconventional controllers, such as a Dance Dance Revolution pad, Rockband Drumkit, and a Guitar Hero controller to prototype alternative mappings and data sending. Further in the future, Tim hopes to explore video-based data collection to quantify statistics like robot aggression and heatmaps of position. Watch Chubby compete here.
Written by Penelope Llibre '25