Cal Poly Rose Float team explores jungle for 2026 design
By Luke Thomas, September 30, 2025
Cal Poly Pomona and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s Rose Float team unveiled its 77th parade float, “Jungle Jumpstart,” for the 2026 Tournament of Roses Parade Sep. 16, taking on this year’s theme of “The Magic in Teamwork.”
The float design showcases a harmony between technology and nature, the wildlife of the jungle coming together to rebuild a broken robot. The concept’s ecosystem includes a frog, jaguar, lemur, monkey and toucan, with a macaw lifted into the air by the restored robot.
According to architecture student and CPP team president Amelia Atwell, the design was chosen through the Rose Float Concept Contest. Students from both schools met in San Luis Obispo in February and decided on the concept, using ideas collected from team members.
“Leaving Concept Contest, we had the idea of a robot in the jungle with some rainforest animals around him,” Atwell said. “We just had that general idea, and over the next few months our design team takes it and creates a story for us. We develop what the float will look like, make it our own. … We usually completely take it on our own way, the Cal Poly way.”
Each school has around 30 team leaders, including a set of presidents, design chairs, construction chairs, decoration chairs and operation chairs. Each of those chairs has a team of leaders who are assigned to work on a certain aspect of the float.
Currently, the float’s chassis is split between the CPP and Cal Poly SLO campuses until October, so the two schools work separately from each other for much of the timeline. Despite being 200 miles apart, however, the two schools see themselves as the same team, according to Atwell.
Cal Poly SLO will drive their chassis to Pomona in mid-October to join the halves and start conjoined work at CPP.
“We start building the float in the summer, but that’s just our leadership team and our team members, so we don’t have the full manpower behind us,” Atwell said. “Starting (Sept. 20) through the end of the year, we’re going to have our full lab days on Saturdays and sometimes even on Sundays, and it’s just go time until finals.”
Atwell estimated 300 to 350 people work on the float on any given lab day.
The main team members will move to Pasadena for the last stretch after finals week, putting the finishing touches on the float and adding the flowers. Between now and then, the main mechanical challenge for the float is the robot’s arm.
“One is the robot’s arm, which is cantilevered out,” Atwell said. “It has two mechanisms in it that makes it quite heavy. There’s the arm itself, which is going to be bending at the elbow, and then the bird being held in the hand is also going to be mechanized. It’s just a lot of weight, and being suspended in the air, so that’s a big challenge.”
Another challenge is the float must be under 16 feet tall to fit under a bridge during one point of the parade. To accommodate this, the float will include a height adjustment mechanism for the toucan and macaw to decrease the height during this portion of the parade.
“I think this is going to be the most thematically beautiful float that we have done within the last four years, from the story we are trying to tell, to the elements, to the passion, the creativity, colors and all available things the audience will be able to see,” said Cal Poly SLO team’s assistant design chair RJ Pollock.
Because of the set budget, many of the float’s materials come from donations. According to Atwell, the team has relationships with farms and flower growers in California that can grow specific flowers for the float, but this year’s theme calls for a bigger reach.
“Past years we’ve been a California-grown float, because we had all of our flowers come from California,” Atwell said. “But when we get to the themes that are like rainforest, … we get things shipped from all over the world, some more tropical flowers.”
The rose float team is accepting donations for the growing need of materials to help complete their project.
Cal Poly Rose Float’s “Jungle Jumpstart” will parade through Pasadena Jan. 1, 2026.
“I’m hoping there’s a lot of moving parts because I really like all the animatronics,” said electrical and computer engineering student Sean Wygant. “I’ve helped them in the past a little bit, so I see what goes into it. It looks like the people doing the motion stuff are really passionate, so I’m looking forward to seeing it.”
