PRK team takes part in “Robotex 2025” with historic success
From 4 to 7 December 2025 the team of the Preiļi Robotics Club (PRK) of the Jānis Eglītis Preiļi State Gymnasium took part in the 25th international robotics competition “Robotex International 2025”, held at the Unibet Arena in Tallinn. This is not only the 25th anniversary year of Robotex, but also the 10th anniversary of our team’s participation in Robotex, because the team first took part in Tallinn in 2015!
This year the PRK team was represented at the competition by Jānis Bērzinieks, Andrejs Gžibovskis, Alens Meirulis and Kārlis Rečs. Robotex competitions are held in various events and age groups, and our team took part in several of them – Lego line following in the U14 and U19 groups, Folkrace in the U19 group, Lego sumo U14, Lego sumo 3kg and Mini sumo.
As in other years, participants came from many countries this year too, but our 4 team members managed to win historic victories in several events, leaving the places on the lower steps of the podium to such robotics powers as China, South Korea, Cyprus, Turkey, Egypt, India, Poland and others.
This year we won:
1st place U14 Lego sumo (Kārlis Rečs, Jānis Bērzinieks)
1st place U14 Lego line following (Kārlis Rečs, Andrejs Gžibovskis)
1st place U19 Lego line following (Andrejs Gžibovskis)
1st place U19 Folkrace (Alens Meirulis, Andrejs Gžibovskis)
2nd place U19 Lego line following (Andrejs Gžibovskis)
3rd place U19 Folkrace (Andrejs Gžibovskis)
This year the most emotional moment for our team was the final of the U14 Lego sumo, in which our Kārlis faced a participant of the Egyptian team on the stage of the main arena. In the final the fight goes to 3 wins – Kārlis’s robot won the first 2 rounds, the opponent the next 2 rounds, and in the last, deciding fight luck was on our team’s side. Of course the arena was understandably very loud and full of passion, but everyone got the message from our team’s fans that Latvia is fighting and winning on the ring!
This year Jānis Bērzinieks and Alens Meirulis had invested a lot of effort in creating a robot for the 3kg Lego sumo event. The robot took 1st place in the sub-group matches and gave reasonable hope of a good result, but in the knockout tournament matches the robot developed a technical fault that could not be fixed straight away – it had to withdraw from further fights. Although the withdrawal was painful, it gives even more motivation to fight in the next competitions.
The best results in Lego events at Robotex until now were two 4th places last year.
Thank you to the boys for selfless and cohesive teamwork!
Thank you to the municipality and the gymnasium for their financial support.
Thank you to the graduate Matīss Dambītis for the advisory support to our team members!
This year’s Robotex results give us confidence that we are able to represent the country elsewhere in the world too.
Juris Erts, head of the robotics club
