Consulate General of the Oriental Republic of Uruguay in Toronto

A delegation from the Technological University of Uruguay (UTEC), Rivera Campus, participated in the FIRA RoboWorld Cup 2026, a technology competition held in Markham, Ontario, Canada, from 17 to 21 July 2026.

As part of this academic and technological mission, the UTEC team was present at York University – Markham Campus, the host institution of the event, which is regarded as a strategic partner for strengthening educational and scientific cooperation between Uruguay and Canada.

In this context, Uruguay’s technological talent and the academic excellence of its public education system once again stood out internationally. The Urubots robotics team from UTEC Rivera won first place in the international “United” Challenge in the Autonomous Vehicles category.

This outstanding achievement was attained by students Santiago Fernández and Gabriel Da Silva, from UTEC Rivera’s Control and Automation Engineering program. They competed as members of a collaborative team formed by random draw alongside university representatives from Canada and Malaysia.

The uniqueness of the “United” Challenge lay in its unpredictability and high technical demands, as the competition task was revealed to participants only five hours before execution. The challenge consisted of establishing seamless and highly accurate real-time communication between two autonomous vehicles operating within a simulated urban environment. The first vehicle, developed by Urubots, was required to navigate the course, detect traffic signs, and interpret its surroundings. The second vehicle, which had no onboard visual recognition sensors, had to complete the course relying exclusively on the real-time data transmitted by the first vehicle.

The vehicle developed by Urubots, a Jeep-scale prototype, is the result of more than one and a half years of research, design, and testing carried out in UTEC Rivera’s laboratories. Santiago Fernández emphasized that the knowledge acquired throughout his university education was essential in addressing the challenge, particularly in C and Python programming for the development of the control software, as well as in Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and 3D printing for manufacturing the vehicle’s mechanical components.

In the overall Autonomous Vehicles ranking, which brought together 17 university delegations from around the world, Urubots also achieved an outstanding fourth place worldwide, sharing the top positions with teams from Canada, Malaysia, and Brazil.

Urubots is composed of approximately twenty students, faculty members, and alumni from various academic disciplines at UTEC Rivera, including Control and Automation Engineering, Data Engineering and Artificial Intelligence, Logistics Engineering, Systems Analysis and Development Technology, and the Graduate Program in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence.

A total of eight members of the Urubots team traveled to Canada to compete in the autonomous vehicles, drones, and humanoid robotics categories.