Catalan students win US robotics prize for remote control wheelchair

A team of four Catalan high school students have won an international robotics competition in the United States for designing a wheelchair that can be remotely controlled through a bracelet that allows the user to open doors, pay bills, contact relatives in case of need, and even lift the user up.

Núria Brusi, Marc Falgueras, Àngel Roncero, and Laia Travé are between 12 and 13 years old and live in Girona, in the north of Catalonia. Having won a contest at the Spanish level, they were selected to travel to Louisville, Kentucky, to participate in the VEX Robotics Competition along with 1,600 teams from around the world.

Participants were presented with an engineering challenge in the form of a game: taking rings from tubes, from one side of a field to another. Each year, the competition expects students to build innovative robots from scratch, with the guidance of their teachers and mentors.