Hyderabad (Telangana) [India], October 17: Eight student teams trained by RFL Academy represented India at the World Robot Olympiad (WRO) Asia Pacific Open Championship 2026 in Hyderabad and won three medals: Gold and Silver in RoboMission Elementary, and Silver in Future Engineers. The championship brought together 149 teams from 25 countries.
What set the results apart was how the teams handled the unexpected. Each competition day included a surprise rule, a task change revealed on the day that teams had to adapt their robots, code and strategy to on the spot.
On Day 1, Team RoboRockstars was the only team in RoboMission Elementary to record a full score with the surprise rule, a performance that led to the Gold medal. On Day 2, Team DNA posted the highest score in the category, also completing the surprise rule, and finished with Silver. In Future Engineers, where teams build autonomous vehicles that navigate a track on their own, Team Sentio won Silver.
“A surprise rule is the closest a competition gets to real engineering,” said Ashwin Shah, Cofounder & CEO, RFL Academy. “You face a problem you haven’t seen, with very little time to solve it. Seeing our students do that calmly, against teams from 25 countries, is exactly what we train for.”
The teams qualified for the international event through WRO India national championship earlier in the season, then spent several months designing, building, programming and testing their robots with RFL Academy coaches under the leadership of Mr. Atul Raut & Mr. Virendrasinh Vaghela. .
Winning teams
RoboRockstars (Gold, RoboMission Elementary): Prithiv Shah (DBIS) | Aryaman Valia (DAIS) | Hetansh Agrawal (JNS), Mumbai.
Team DNA (Silver, RoboMission Elementary): Neil Jain (Cathedral) | Sahir Astir (Oberoi Int.) | Avvyukt Shukla (Cathedral), Mumbai.
Team Sentio (Silver, Future Engineers):Deyaan Agrawal (AU) | Aarav Jalan (ADIS) | Darsh Zaveri (AGS), Ahmedabad.
About RFL Academy
RFL Academy (Robofun Lab Pvt. Ltd.) has taught robotics, coding, AI and STEM to K-12 students for over a decade, with centres in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Surat, Rajkot, Jamnagar, Hyderabad and Goa.. Its students compete in WRO, FIRST LEGO League, FIRST Tech Challenge, FIRST Robotics Competition, VEX and Codeavour since 2016 and have been making India proud by winning at the international championships!