Noah Büttner works on the rover arm on Thursday, June 26, 2025. Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
Noah Büttner
We all encounter situations in our lives where we recognize flaws in current products or processes. Whenever I come across something that doesn’t quite work as well as it could, my mind instantly turns to the solution side of things, looking for ways to make it more efficient.
The transformation of wires and lines of code into a tangible product has always been my motivation for creation. All of the effort that went into design, building, and debugging becomes worthwhile once the product is real. Whenever I fix a bug in code, or remap an electrical component, the satisfaction drives me to keep creating.
nurover
Team Lead
I’ve spent most of my free time at Northeastern leading the Northeastern Mars Rover Team.
As Team Lead, I head up a team of 100+ multi-disciplinary students working to build a fully-functional Mars Rover to compete in the University Rover Challenge and other international competitions.
As the Integration Lead and Software Lead of the Northeastern University Mars Rover Team, I’ve designed, built, wired, and programmed our 50 kg rover equipped with a 6 DOF arm, life detection system, and multiple wireless communication bands. In my four years on the team, I’ve spearheaded technical advancements in all major subsystems, including the addition of:
Complete autonomous navigation
Wireless operation up to 2km away
Inverse kinematics control algorithms for brushless motors and RLS absolute encoders
Intuitive control interface with haptic force feedback to our scaled down “model arm”
Robust streaming of 15 cameras
Linear Quadratic Regulator on SO(2) Lie Group for each of the end effectors’ continuous joints
competition / awards
In 2025 our rover — Watney Mark VI — placed 3rd at the University Rover Challenge, from a field of 114 teams from 15 countries. I led the team of 24 students through the challenges of integration and testing during a week-long journey in robotics integration in the desert.
My most favorite challenge was discovering that our arm’s motor controllers were light sensitive, something we could have only encountered while operating in the bright Utah sun. This has quickly become a running joke on our team for how Murphy’s law will always apply.
We’ve also attended competitions in Canada, with 1st and 4th place finishes in the winter and summer Canadian Rover Challenges in 2024-25.
Directing and producing our System Acceptance Review video.
Community outreach
Teaching and being a mentor to others has always been a part of my journey as an engineer, with rewarding experiences centered around providing STEM-learning opportunities for kids who may not otherwise have the chance to get involved with robotics. In high school, I mentored 20 FIRST Lego League teams, leading their weekly team meetings and gaining experience with how to work with a wide variety of younger students.
Wanting to bring these same opportunities to Northeastern, I organized our NURover board to dramatically increase our outreach program. We now participate in 20+ events annually, including the Boston Public Schools Science Fair, the Northeastern Preschool, local showcases to students in Roxbury schools, and representing Northeastern at the MassRobotics RoboBoston Block Party. I’ve also led the team at the Museum of Science’s Computer Science Education Weekend every year, where kids play “rover fetch” and learn about how robots think and act. At the same time, the rover team gains incredible feedback from these events, which demonstrate which systems are robust for multi-hour usage and how the public interacts with and perceives our robot.
My favorite mentoring experience has been the Northeastern SPLASH program. In high school, attending SPLASH at MIT each fall was an annual highlight, spending two days soaking up random one-hour lessons from energetic college students. At Northeastern, I’ve taught SPLASH classes to middle and high schoolers each semester, presenting lectures like “How to Build a Robot Arm” and “Radios in Space” with live rover demos. With 10-20 kids in each section, the environment challenges me to make learning fun and be aware of the wide range of backgrounds and prior knowledge. I would love to launch a SPLASH program at Brown to continue to share my love of robotics with the next generation, enriching myself in the process.
INDUSTRY EXPERIENCE
As a co-op on the Engineering Operations team at the Robotics and AI Institute (formerly Boston Dynamics AI Institute) I helped setup robots, performed data collection, and wire robots. Additionally, I was able to assist a PhD student with a research paper related to improving manipulation perception by segmenting distractor objects from observation sets.
I gained experience with state of the art robots such as the Boston Dynamics Spot, Kinova, Franka, and Rainbow RB-Y1 platforms.
Presenting research results to RAI team
Dephy
I was a software intern in Summer 2022 and 2023 for Dephy, an ankle exo-skelton startup that mentored my high school robotics team that I led. Dephy introduced me to the excitement of seeing lab work develop into a commercial product, while working on their exoskeleton inspired me with the transformational benefits robotics can bring to people.
ENTREPRENEURIAL ENDEAVORS
I’ve started or co-founded several ventures, including NinjaWorks, a hardware and software cloud company detailed below.
Over the past decade, the popularity of the television show American Ninja Warrior has led to the creation of hundreds of “ninja gyms” around the world where normal people have the opportunity to test themselves against rigorous upper body and agility obstacles, and even to compete in recreational ninja leagues. I have competed in many individual and team competitions for the past nine years.
The journey for me started nine years ago, when I started Ninja Warrior training and built my own backyard course. After we finished the initial design, my younger brother and I decided that one thing was missing – a timer and buzzer that would make our home course feel just as cool and exciting as the TV show.
As we began developing a robust commercial product, we evolved from the tiny LCD display to a 7-segment display, and eventually into a 32x128 LED pixel display that connects to the internet using a microprocessor. After my dad and I built the first systems by hand, we were able to move to commercial production, allowing me to shift the focus of my time to software development.
After showing off the timer at a local competition, top ninja gyms around the country started asking for their own system. I convinced my parents we should start a business. We called it NinjaWorks, I’m proud to be co-founder and Senior Software Developer.
The NinjaWorks system has become integrated with the web, allowing every buzzer press to be tracked instantly across the internet. We are now the timing backbone for ninja competitions nationwide and are the official timing system for the World Ninja League and their World championships.