A team of three teenagers from the Gyumri Development Laboratory won first place in the senior Future Innovators category at the WRO 2026 Open Championship Europe, reports Zartonk Media.
The championship is the European leg of the World Robot Olympiad, one of the largest school robotics competitions in the world, which its organizers say reaches more than 100,000 students in over 95 countries.
Silvi Khachatryan, Elen Khachatryan and Davit Petrosyan, aged 15 and 16, competed against about 250 teams in Zagreb. Their coach is Ashot Zilfimyan. The robot they built scans a book and converts its contents into audio, video and slide presentations.
It is designed for people with reading and visual difficulties, and for students working through large volumes of material before exams.
The three got the idea from a visually impaired classmate who was struggling at school.
The event ran at the Zagreb Fair in Croatia from October 13 to 16. Armenia sent 6 teams, 2 in Future Innovators and 4 in RoboMission, each of which had won its category at Armenia’s national stage.
“In the future, if the children wish, the robot they have created could be developed into a startup and patented,” said Angela Baltayan, co-founder of Contests Lab and manager of the competition.
In 2024 the team won a gold medal at an open competition in Italy with a waste-sorting project.
The Gyumri Development Laboratory was founded in 2021 to build children’s technological knowledge, engineering skills and innovative thinking.
The World Robot Olympiad has been held since 2004 and is run by the WRO Association, an independent non-profit registered in Singapore. It is open to students aged 8 to 19.
Contests Lab, an educational non-governmental organization, has been the Olympiad’s official representative in Armenia and the sole organizer of its national stage since 2023. The Olympiad itself has been held in Armenia for 10 years, since the Ayb Educational Foundation first brought it to the country in 2016.
