Folsom-area robotics team wins big at State Championship

A Folsom-area high school robotics team has secured a spot at the 2026 VEX Robotics World Championship in St. Louis after earning one of the highest honors for programming excellence at the California Region 2 VEX V5 State Championship. Team COGNITAUR 29712C took home the Think Award, given to the team that demonstrates the most innovative and effective autonomous programming, sensor integration and strategic design. Out of 80 competing teams from across the state, judges praised COGNITAUR for its sophisticated technical approach and thorough engineering documentation. At the heart of the team's success is C-PRISM (Cognitaur Probabilistic Runtime Inference & Sensor Fusion Model), a groundbreaking framework developed by team captain Ayushmaan Bellum. This system uses advanced probabilistic reasoning with particle filtering and real-time confidence estimation to help the robot accurately determine its position and make smarter decisions during autonomous runs even in noisy or uncertain conditions. Ayushmaan led the development of C-PRISM and maintained programming documentation in their comprehensive engineering notebook that tracked every stage of the robot's evolution, from initial concepts and code iterations to full competition testing and performance analysis. "Creating reliable autonomous behavior is the real challenge in robotics," said Bellum. "C-PRISM lets the robot understand when it's unsure and correct itself on the fly. Seeing that work recognized with the Think Award was incredibly rewarding." The four-member team includes Ayushmaan Bellum, Captain, Lead Programmer, CAD Designer, Builder, and Driver; Ameya Gupta, Scouting and Documentation; Arnav Bodas, Lead Documentation and Strategy; and Umesh Maddineni, Documentation and Strategy. The VEX Robotics program is one of the world's largest student engineering competitions, bringing together teams from more than 60 countries.