A team of Saint Lucian innovators will represent the island in Incheon, South Korea, at this year’s FIRST Global Challenge. The FIRST Global Challenge is an Olympics-style international robotics competition held annually, bringing together some of the world’s most innovative minds from over 190 countries from October 7 to 10, 2026.
Under this year’s theme, “Igniting Innovation”, the team of students built a robot with ball-shooting capabilities designed to propel an object into a goal. For the third consecutive year, the Saint Lucia-based technology company Orbtronics has served as FIRST Global’s facilitating partner in Saint Lucia, spearheading the team’s development of this technology, under the mentorship of Kevon Clark, a mechatronics engineer at Orbtronics.
During a pre-departure ceremony for Team Saint Lucia, Sherguan Roserie, co-founder of Orbtronics, emphasised the importance of this achievement, not just for the technology company, but for the nation as a whole.
“This has been months of hard work from our team. Our team has spent God knows how many hours working towards getting the robot ready for this competition. This is particularly important for Orbtronics, and not only Orbtronics, but the nation at large, because what this represents is something bigger than ourselves,” Rosary said.
“Their participation at the international robotics competition continues to be a beacon for young students growing up interested in technology and robotics that there are avenues to pursue their passions.”
The captain of Team Saint Lucia for this year’s competition is Matthew George. He explained how his team managed to build the robot in time for the event.
“Getting ready for the FIRST Global Challenge has been difficult. Challenge is in the name. But as a team, we’ve persevered. We’ve built a robot that we’ve had to build like three separate times. We’ve done this by listening to one another, sharing responsibilities, and, of course, following the engineering process,” George said.
Team Saint Lucia’s participation in the FIRST Global Challenge this year is sponsored by LUCELEC and Republic Bank through its Power to Make a Difference programme.
