A team of three Bangladeshi university students has won bronze at the World Robot Olympiad (WRO) Asia-Pacific Open Championship 2026, held in Hyderabad, India, from 25 to 27 September.

Team Blueprint finished third in the Future Engineers category, in which teams build small self-driving vehicles that must find their way around a track and avoid obstacles. The championship brought together 149 teams from 25 countries under the theme "Robot Meets Culture".

The team and its car

The team was made up of Samman Rahin of the Islamic University of Technology, who led the group and handled the electrical and control systems; Syed Subeh-Sadik Sholok of the Military Institute of Science and Technology, who worked on perception, control and software; and Azmain Sheikh Rubayed of Northern University Bangladesh, who built the mechanical parts.

Their car, called Talos, uses artificial intelligence running on the vehicle itself, without a cloud connection, to detect obstacles and follow the track. The students first tried a colour-based camera system but found it was thrown off by changes in light. They then rebuilt it around the YOLOv8 computer vision model so the car could recognise obstacles from what its camera sees. The design uses a low centre of gravity and precise steering for stability at speed.

Azmain said finishing third abroad had been rewarding, and that competing with skilled teams from other countries had helped them learn and test their own abilities.

Four teams from Bangladesh

Bangladesh sent four teams in three categories, with a 13-member delegation including nine competitors. Another team, Odyssey X, finished seventh in the Future Innovators Senior category. The delegation was led by Promi Nahid, national organiser of WRO Bangladesh, who said success in robotics depended as much on problem analysis, time management and teamwork as on building the robot.

The teams were chosen through the national round of World Robot Olympiad Bangladesh 2026, held on 14 August in Dhaka, Chattogram and Rangpur, where more than 200 students in about 72 teams took part. Ahead of that, WRO Bangladesh and the Bangladesh Open Source Network held 14 robotics workshops across five districts in June, reaching around 2,000 students.

For young people in Munshiganj interested in engineering, the result shows that Bangladeshi students can compete with the region's best when they get hands-on training and the chance to take part.

Sources: wro-association.org, bdosn.org