Hiranya Agarwal. Second year mechanical engineering at UNSW, co-founder of CentralPass and the person who wrote it, seven seasons of competition robotics, and one drone that is currently being talked into flying straight.
Intake rollersPulls triballs in off the floor and hands them to the scoring mechanism.
41103ATeam NextGen, Pedare Christian College, Adelaide. The only South Australian team at the 2024 World Championship.
Gear trainRed high strength gears on the scoring mechanism, packaged around the intake so both could exist at once.
Pneumatics and wiringAir lines to the folding wings and the end game climb, driven by the C++ control code I wrote.
DrivetrainEncoders and an inertial sensor fused in software, so the autonomous routine ends up where it did in practice.
1Intake rollers
2Team plate 41103A
3Gear train
4Pneumatics and wiring
5Drivetrain
The Over Under robot, 2023 to 2024 season, in the pit at the Australian national championship. Hover or tap the markers. Two national titles, two world championship qualifications, and the 2024 World Championship Sportsmanship Award in Dallas.
Based
Sydney and Adelaide
Studying
B.E. (Hons) Mechanical, UNSW, year two
Building
CentralPass and the ADA²M drone
Looking for
2026/27 vacation programs
Right nowSeptember 2026
Running a live venueCentralPass, the direct ordering platform I built so venues can stop paying Uber Eats, is taking orders, payments and bookings at Caffe Primo Firle. Bugs get found during service, not in a sprint review.
Tuning a droneADA²M flies. The stability loop is still being tuned and the sensor payload is going on alongside it.
Coaching VEX IQAt Barker College in Hornsby, getting VEX IQ teams through design, build and code and ready for competition.
Six builds, in order of how much of each one is running.
The first three are in use, in the air or on the field. The three below them are finished, handed on or still being proved. Where a project has no measured result yet, the page says so instead of filling the gap with a number.
Proprietary ordering and operations software I built over several months to give venues a way out of marketplace apps like Uber Eats. A venue gets its own branded ordering site, payments straight into its own Stripe account, a live staff queue on a tablet, an owner portal and receipts printing at the counter. Every part of it, from the webhook that confirms a payment to the bridge sitting beside the receipt printer, was designed, written and deployed by me.
A two person aircraft built to fly a fixed route over farmland and log temperature, humidity and air quality without anyone walking the paddock. Custom carbon fibre frame, an F405 flight controller, a Crossfire link and a Jetson Nano doing inference on board. It flies. It is still being tuned.
One robot that had to score, cross a barrier and climb, and do it the same way every match. I wrote the C++ control stack and the sensor fusion under it, designed the pneumatic mechanisms, and ran a seven person team through two national titles and the world championship in Dallas.
Eight years, year by year. Most of it is robots. The engineering habits I have now were all formed in a school pit with a match clock running.
Joined VEX Robotics at Pedare Christian College.
Team 41103A, competing as NextGen. The first lesson of competition robotics arrives quickly: a robot that works on the bench is not the same thing as a robot that works on a field with another robot pushing it.
Helped run the Australian National VEX Championship.
Event organisation alongside the build. Good practice for any job where you are both the engineer and the person who gets the call when something breaks.
The flywheel robot, and the first of two national titles in a row.
A flywheel and gear train on the upper deck, drive motors underneath, and a home practice field where most of the driving hours happened rather than at events.
Flywheel deckHome field
Captain. National champions again. Then Dallas.
The last robot and the best one. Back to back Australian titles, the only South Australian team to qualify for the VEX World Championship, and the Sportsmanship Award in the high school engineering division among roughly 820 teams from more than 70 countries. ABC Radio Adelaide and Glam Adelaide covered it.
Pit floor, DallasEvery one of 820 teams within walking distance of your bench.
Australian Defence Force Future Innovators Award.
Awarded in my final year of school. Then a move interstate.
UNSW, BlueSat, and a lab of our own.
Started mechanical engineering at UNSW. Led the antenna pointing mounts for BlueSat's CubeSat ground station and handed the package on at the end of the year. Co-founded Project Umbrella Labs and started building the ADA²M drone in it.
CentralPass goes live. Back in a VEX pit, on the other side of the table.
Co-founded CentralPass, wrote the platform over several months, and put its first venue into production at Caffe Primo Firle. Started coaching VEX IQ teams at Barker College, on the other side of the pit table this time.
In the press.
Where the work has turned up outside this site. Coverage of the robotics team, and the lab I co-founded at UNSW. None of it is mine to edit.
The work I keep coming back to sits where mechanics, electronics and software have to agree with each other, and where somebody real is waiting on the result.
A cafe owner waiting on a receipt, a drone waiting on a stability loop, an antenna waiting on a satellite pass, a team waiting on an autonomous routine. Seven years of competition robotics taught me three things that transferred: design against a fixed deadline, test without defending your own ideas, and keep a team moving after a bad qualifying round.
I grew up in Adelaide and study in Sydney, and I move between the two often enough that both count as home. I am in the second year of a Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) in Mechanical Engineering at UNSW.
Ask me about
Odometry drift
Folding pneumatic wings
F405 PID tuning
Stripe webhooks
Thermal receipt printers
Why a CubeSat pass lasts minutes
Carbon fibre airframes
Running a national championship
Toolbox
SolidWorks and Fusion 360 for mechanical design. C++ on embedded and competition hardware. Python for automation, data and trading. TypeScript, React and Node for CentralPass and the browser game. PostgreSQL, Stripe, Socket.io, Railway and Cloudflare in production.
VEX World Championship Sportsmanship AwardTeam 41103A NextGen, high school engineering division, Dallas.
Australian Defence Force Future Innovators AwardFinal year of secondary school.
Say hello
Open for 2026/27 vacation programs and internships.
Mechanical, mechatronic and systems engineering. Based in Sydney and Adelaide, moving between the two, and able to relocate for the right program. Email is the fastest way to reach me.
