Perhaps those wondering what the future holds for Ukraine should look to outer space.
The Space Robotics team from Ukrainian Catholic University had an impressive performance at the 2026 European Rover Challenge last month, marking the first time a Ukrainian team has participated in the international competition and shining a spotlight on the skills of Ukraine’s best and brightest students.
The Ukrainian team, with the support of Nova Ukraine and other sponsors, reached the finals of the competition, finishing in the top 20 among 124 other teams from across Europe. The event took place Sept. 4-6 in Krakow, Poland.
The competition required the teams’ rovers to perform several tasks that simulated a Mars mission. The vehicles navigated across rough terrain, collected samples using a robotic arm, and worked alongside a drone to scout the area. The competition tested the performance of the entire system, including communications, navigation, mechanics, electronics, and autonomous behavior.
The Ukrainian team, under the auspices of the Faculty of Applied Sciences at UCU, spent six months planning and building its planetary rover, dubbed Indomitus.
According to an article published by UCU, the Ukrainian team and the Indomitus rover performed best in the final task of “probing,” which involved searching for samples and collecting them. The rovers had to find certain objects quickly, pick them up with a manipulator, and place them in a container. The UCU team achieved the maximum score of 200 points in completing the task.
The overall first-place prize in the competition went to the team from EPFL in Switzerland, considered one of the world’s leading technology universities.
Ukrainians Demonstrate Ingenuity
Yaryna Zabchuk, a third-year Computer Science student and a member of the UCU Space Robotics team, said the most challenging aspect of the project was dealing with critical situations, especially in the last week before the trip and during the competitions. Under pressure, the Ukrainians demonstrated their ingenuity and determination to succeed.
“When an important and expensive component breaks down and there’s no spare, you have to find a solution really quickly,” she says. “Our team handled it well. Some people tried to figure out the cause of the failure and whether it could be repaired, while others were simultaneously looking for replacements, contacting other teams and stores.
“We didn’t stop because of a problem; we immediately looked for different ways to solve it,” says Zabchuk.
The UCU Space Robotics team includes 25 students in the Computer Science and Robotics programs, along with five mentors, according to the UCU article. The team is divided into several specialized groups that are each responsible for different components of the rover: software, electronics, mechanics, and others. The main mentor of the project is Andriy Ozgovych, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Information Technology at UCU. Third-year Computer Science student Mykola Balyk coordinated the work of the student team.
Hard Work Yields Joy for Ukrainian Team
The ERC competition gave the Ukrainian students the opportunity to test their skills against other university teams that have been developing their own space robotics programs for years and even decades in some cases.
“We didn’t set ourselves the goal of winning; we just tried to do our part of the job as best we could,” says Zabchuk. “When we realized that we were the first to cross the finish line and that everything worked well – from communication to mechanics and electronics – it was a [feeling of] great joy and real euphoria. It was then that we especially felt what we had been working for all these months.”
Yaroslav Prytula, First Vice-Rector of UCU and Founding Dean of the Faculty of Applied Sciences, says he was proud of the students’ performance at the competition.
“This is what studying at a university should look like: not just lectures on how something works, but a laboratory, a team, and a complex challenge that students work on together,” he says. “Today, this challenge has led them to the ERC finals, and tomorrow, I hope, it will lead to even more ambitious engineering projects.”
Oles Dobosevych, Dean of the Faculty of Applied Sciences at UCU, says the competition helped develop teamwork among the students as they blended different engineering disciplines and coordinated tasks among the teams.
“During these six months, students have gone through a path that is difficult to reproduce within the framework of a regular training course: from the first idea to a complex engineering system that had to be designed, assembled, tested, and made to work in international competitions,” he says.
Planning for More Competitions
Looking ahead, the team plans to continue improving the functionality of the Indomitus rover based on lessons learned from the competition. The team will focus on the training of rover pilots and the manipulator arm, as well as on the development of autonomous navigation and autonomous robot behavior, according to the UCU article. Plans call for the team to return to the European Rover Challenge in the future and to participate in other international space robotics competitions.
The team is also in the process of preparing the materials it needs to solicit new sponsors that could support the project. In addition to Nova Ukraine, other partners that supported the team included Ukrainian Catholic University, SoftServe, ELEKS, and Infineon. Nova Ukraine is a founding donor to the UCU robotics program, providing financial support for faculty, lab equipment, and other needs.
The UCU Space Robotics team is just one example of the support that Nova Ukraine provides for educational initiatives under its EMPOWER pillar. Support for science and technology education has become increasingly important since the full-scale Russian invasion, which has targeted textbooks and other science and educational infrastructure. Just last month, a jet-powered Russian drone caused extensive damage to the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in central Kyiv, for example.
