MakerLab Elite Wins 2nd Place at RoboCup 2025 in Brazil
- MakerLab
- Aug 12
- 2 min read
We are very proud to announce that the MakerLab Elite robotics teams achieved a fantastic result at RoboCup 2025, securing 2nd place worldwide in the RCJ Rescue SuperTeam challenge. The event took place in Salvador, Brazil, from July 15-21, with over 2,000 participants from 45 countries mainly representing leading universities and research institutes.
RoboCup is the world’s most prestigious robotics and AI competition, known for its gut-wrenchingly demanding challenges and strong academic orientation. It is the stated goal of RoboCup to “develop a robot soccer team which beats the human world champion team by 2050”.
Founder of MakerLab, Panagiotis Theocharis, who acted as the Elite team’s mentor in this year's competition and was with them in Brazil, believes RoboCup is about much more than simply teams competing against each other and trying to build the coolest robot.
“Each year, we see how RoboCup sets new standards for the possibilities of what we can achieve when building autonomous systems. It is a push, globally, to go further and invent new ways of human-robot interaction, under complex conditions but always imitating real-life and realistic scenarios.”
“Of all the competitions our Elite team is training for, RoboCup is by far the one that makes them work the hardest, and think the furthest outside of the box.”
At the annual competition, teams are judged on technical performance, collaboration, and the quality of their scientific documentation, which includes a poster, technical paper, and presentation video submitted prior to the event. An important part of the event is a one-hour interview during which a panel of professors and researchers goes through all the submitted materials and evaluates the team's academic documentation and research efforts. The event is held over a total of five days, with the majority of the time dedicated to the practical performance of the robots.
At the 2025 competition, MakerLab Elite impressed both on the field and during academic evaluation, presenting innovative autonomous navigation tools and adaptability in unpredictable rescue missions. The team also presented their research at the WEROB - Workshop on Educational Robotics, receiving positive international recognition.
Results
In the Rescue Maze category, MakerLab Elite earned:
1st Place - Scientific Poster
2nd Place - Scientific Documentation
2nd Place - Rescue SuperTeam
Team Members: Ilias Athanasopoulos, Menelaos Panagiotis Papazacharias, Eleftherios Chalvantzis
In the Rapidly Manufactured Robot Challenge (RMRC), they ranked:
3rd in Scientific Documentation
6th Overall
Team Members: Nikolaos Kordas, Konstantinos Sarakis, Fotios Tsiounis
Support and Acknowledgements
Our trip to Brazil and participation in RoboCup would not have been possible without the help of our amazing supporters!
Gold Sponsor: Accenture.
Bronze Sponsors:
Special thanks to the Municipality of Agrinio for supporting RoboCup Hellas, the national qualifier.
