Four Sri Lankan school teams placed in their categories at the Asia Pacific Robot Olympiad in Hyderabad, competing against 149 teams from 25 countries, the Daily Mirror reported.
The championship ran from 25 to 27 September at the GMR Arena in Aerocity, Hyderabad, hosted by WRO India, with more than 700 participants and supporters. The theme was “Robots Meet Culture”. Union Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat inaugurated the event.
The Sri Lankan teams qualified at the WRO national competition in Sri Lanka, organised by national organiser Burhani Serendib School. All four competed in the Future Innovators category, where students design an original robot to solve a real problem in their own communities.
A robotic guide dog — 8th place
Team MechRE of Gateway College Negombo took 8th in the Senior category with Jaga, a robotic guide dog for blind and elderly users.
The problem they set out to solve was cost and access: a trained guide dog can cost over Rs. 1.5 million and involve years of waiting, and many families cannot keep a dog indoors. Jaga leads its user around obstacles, warns of what is in the way, and reports to family members through a mobile app.
The method is as notable as the machine. Ometh, Nethika and Sineth interviewed their own grandparents and their friends before building anything; ten of the 13 elders they spoke to said they had trouble finding their way around the house. Their first version broke under regular use, and they rebuilt it with stronger parts.
A farming robot — 10th place
Team F — Bothalage Akindu Dilneth Ranuraka Fernando and Mohamed Rishad Aahil — took 10th in the Junior category with FUSION, built for small-scale farmers and home gardeners.
FUSION navigates a garden on its own, recognises plants and waters them only when the soil is dry. The team drew on Nakath, the Sri Lankan practice of choosing auspicious times for farming work: the robot offers Nakath-informed watering guidance and supports traditional crops and medicinal plants such as Gotukola, with an app giving advice rooted in local knowledge.
Smart glasses for heritage sites — 15th place
Team R.E.A.C.H. — Colombo students Taher Hussain, Ammaar Mustafa and Taher Iqbal Hussain — took 15th in the Senior category with EchoLens, a clip-on device for ordinary glasses.
It shows live captions of a tour guide’s speech, reads museum labels aloud, describes what is in front of the wearer and turns sign language into speech — aimed at opening museums and heritage sites to visitors who are blind, hard of hearing or unable to speak. The team has Sigiriya as its main use case. It was their second WRO appearance, after a debut in Singapore last year.
A folding hospital bed — 17th place
Team Syncro-Rise — Sethika, Kithuja and Randiw, in Grades 6 and 7 — took 17th in the Elementary category with a Smart Multifunctional Hospital Bed. One touch of a sensor folds it from flat into a sitting chair, so patients can change position without being lifted. They built it with a LEGO kit after seeing how hard nurses in Sri Lankan hospitals work to move patients.
Not reported: the filing does not say how many Sri Lankan teams competed in total or which countries took the top places in each category. It gives no full names for several students, does not say whether any team advances to the WRO international final, and carries no comment from the teams, their schools or the national organiser. It does not say how the trip was funded.
