The Cayman Islands National Robotics Team returned home on 13 October from the 2026 FIRST Global Challenge in Incheon, South Korea, with a gold medal for an invention designed to catch fires early at the George Town landfill and a bronze medal in the main robotics tournament, the strongest showing since the Cayman Islands first sent a team in 2018.

FIRST Global, the U.S.-based organisation that runs the annual competition, named the Cayman Islands as gold winner of its FG Innovator Award for the New Technology Experience in results published at the close of the event, which ran from 7 to 10 October. Moldova took silver and Slovakia bronze in that category. In the main tournament, Cayman's robot competed in a four-country alliance with the People's Republic of China, Turkmenistan and Türkiye, which finished third in the finals behind alliances built around Venezuela and El Salvador and around the United Arab Emirates and Japan.

FIRST Global said nearly 190 countries took part in this year's challenge, themed "Igniting Innovation", which asked teams to explore how science, technology and international cooperation can help communities confront wildfires. The official results site records Cayman's alliance with 1,009 points over two finals matches, seven behind the silver alliance on 1,016 and 51 behind the champions on 1,060. Dart, whose Minds Inspired programme runs the team, told The Caymanian Journal (TCJ) that Cayman placed 23rd of 185 countries in the preliminary rankings, qualifying for the playoffs, and that the alliance came through six further rounds to reach the finals.

A device built for Cayman's own fire problem

The New Technology Experience is an optional category that runs alongside the main robot build. Where every national team receives the same standard kit of parts for the tournament robot, the optional project is not restricted to that kit, and teams are asked to apply the year's theme to a real problem at home. FIRST Global established the category in 2021 to keep students current with emerging technology, and this year framed wildfire management in three phases, detect, combat and prevent, from which each team chose one. Cayman chose detection.

For a team from islands whose most notorious fires burn at a landfill rather than in woodland, the choice of problem was not difficult. Cayman's entry, named DumpDefender, is an autonomous smoke- and methane-detection device intended to give early warning of fires at the George Town landfill. Dart's Minds Inspired programme, of which the national team is a division, said in June that the project targeted the recurring fires at the site and aimed to improve detection and response times and to cut toxic fumes. The device carries thermal and standard cameras to pick up heat signatures, sensors that detect flammable gases and monitor air quality, and an alert system, and is built to withstand sun, rough terrain and hazardous chemicals. Dart describes it as a prototype and has a concept video showing how a swarm of such robots could detect or predict fire risk.

The problem the students set out to solve has been in the news for most of the year. On 26 March, a fire broke out in recently deposited waste on the side of the landfill facing the Esterley Tibbetts Highway. The Department of Environmental Health said it was contained quickly, and its director, Richard Simms, said the likely cause was a battery thrown in with regular garbage, "a clear reminder that batteries must never be placed in regular household garbage".

Three weeks later, on 16 April, a far larger fire took hold in one of the active fill areas. Smoke spread across George Town, the Esterley Tibbetts Highway was closed between the Camana Bay and Butterfield roundabouts, and residents were told to stay indoors with windows and doors shut. The Cayman Islands Red Cross opened a shelter on Huldah Avenue and the Department of Environmental Health began testing air quality. Five schools closed on 17 April, among them Cayman International School, where two members of the robotics team are students. At 07:30 that morning the Cayman Islands Fire Service estimated the top sections of the landfill to be about 85% contained, with surface flare-ups continuing, and said two officers had been taken to George Town Hospital for medical evaluation during the night.

Chief Fire Officer Dwight "Randy" Rankin warned at the time of "deep-seated burning, possible methane gas pockets, and intense internal heat" that can persist after visible flames are out.

A third, small surface fire in recently tipped waste was put out within minutes on the morning of 1 May, its cause unknown, and a fourth was found on the north side of the site on 3 June. The Ministry of Health, Environment and Sustainability said that one was picked up during routine monitoring and put out by DEH crews before it could spread. Minister Katherine Ebanks-Wilks MP said she wanted "to reassure the public that this incident was identified and addressed quickly through routine monitoring", and the ministry's acting chief officer, Exie Tomlinson-Panton, credited DEH crews whose "quick identification of the fire and immediate intervention ensured that it was extinguished before it could spread". Another fire, in freshly placed garbage on the western side of the site, was reported to the fire service at about 03:00 on 5 August and brought under control quickly; the department said at the time that its staff had stopped four separate battery fires at the landfill the previous Friday, each igniting as the batteries were handled.

The Ministry told TCJ on 13 October that the department "currently do not have any special equipment or monitoring devices to detect fires at the landfill" and that only physical spot checks are carried out daily, although it is working with the Royal Cayman Islands Police Service to use infrared cameras on the police helicopter to pick up unusual temperature rises before a fire breaks out. The Ministry said six very small surface fires had been recorded at the site in 2026, most likely caused by batteries in general waste, and that the landfill compactor, which reduces the air pockets in which fires start, is out of service. Methane from the site is flared off and not captured or measured, it said.

Five members of the squad worked on the entry. Daniel Branis of Cayman International School led it and did the technical build and programming with Kieran Finch and Teejhan Hansraj, former national team members whom the rules allowed to take part in the optional category, while Kyla Machingambi and Stefan Szczurko delivered the pitch to the judges. Namitha Abraham, the team's mentor and manager of project delivery at Caribbean Utilities Company, said in June that Daniel "was chosen for his strong skills in research, coding and programming".

From a field of 81 to the final five

When the team was announced in June, Dart said it hoped the landfill project would be among 10 teams invited to present in South Korea. The project did better than that: according to Dart, it was shortlisted from 81 national entries to 15 and then named one of five finalists in September. Finalists presented live to a panel of judges in Incheon with a 90-second overview, visual aids and a working demonstration of the device.

Glenda McTaggart, the team's manager and senior manager of education programmes at Dart, told TCJ that as first-time participants in the category "the team felt strongly that designing and building a prototype robot that could help detect dump fires would be an impactful way to utilize their engineering and problem-solving skills to solve a local issue". The judging panel, she said, included leaders from MIT, Google, the Project Management Institute Educational Foundation and XPRIZE. "We are extremely proud of the passion and confidence demonstrated by the team as they presented the Dump Defender solution and demonstration, then fielding questions from the judging panel," she said. "The team's gold medal performance showed that research, innovative thinking, and use of technology to solve a real-world problem was the right combination."

The tournament robot

The team's tournament robot, Scotch Bonnet, was built for the two main actions of this year's game: collecting balls and shooting them into a suppression unit, and climbing an inclined brace 6.4 metres long. In the FIRST Global format, each nation fields one robot built from the same kit of parts and plays qualification matches in changing multinational alliances before a playoff tournament decides the medals. The gold-medal alliance this year was made up of Venezuela, El Salvador, Uzbekistan and Moldova, and the silver of the United Arab Emirates, Japan, Hong Kong and Luxembourg, with Cayman's alliance of China, Turkmenistan and Türkiye taking bronze.

The competition began in Washington, D.C., in 2017, and Cayman joined the following year, when the event was held in Mexico City. National teams have since competed in Dubai, Geneva, Singapore, Athens and Panama City. Last year in Panama the team finished 34th of 191 national teams without reaching the semi-finals, Cayman's best result until this week; Ms McTaggart called it at the time "an amazing achievement for Cayman".

How the team is chosen

The nine students were selected after the interschool FIRST Tech Challenge tournament on 28 February, the eighth annual edition of the event and the qualifying platform for the national team, which drew 86 students from eight schools operating 14 robots.

The 2026 team comes from eight schools across Grand Cayman and Cayman Brac: Daniel Branis and Stefan Szczurko (Cayman International School), Luke Comley-White (Grace Christian Academy), Dimari Dewar (Clifton Hunter High School), Nicolas Havlin (St. Ignatius Catholic School), Kyla Machingambi (Cayman Prep & High School), Christopher McTaggart (Triple C School), Raam Samarth Palakkal (Layman Scott High School) and Allyandro Shand (John Gray High School).

Ms McTaggart said when the team was announced that "selection to the national team is a significant achievement", and that the students "distinguished themselves through their performance, dedication and commitment" at the interschool tournament.

Ms Abraham is joined on the mentoring side by Desmond White of John Gray High School, who has coached the national team since at least 2023, and Kyle Farrington and Cedric Worthmann of Caribbean Utilities Company. Craig Maitland, who competed with Mr Finch in Dubai in 2019, also supported this year's squad alongside him and Mr Hansraj. The robotics programme's sponsors, covering the junior and high-school competitions as well as the national team, are Dart Minds Inspired, Health City Cayman Islands, Caribbean Utilities Company, Logic, KPMG and Aureum Re.

What comes next

FIRST Global announced at the closing ceremony that Madrid will host the 2027 challenge, with the theme still to be announced.

Whether DumpDefender moves from a competition demonstration to the landfill itself is now a question for the government. The Ministry said the department had not been approached by Dart about the device, but that its director has heard presentations from two companies, Security Center and Corporate Electric, offering fire-detection systems, with a third, from AVCOM, scheduled for 13 October. The same day, Ms Ebanks-Wilks MP met the team at the airport on its return, and the Ministry said it was agreed that the students would present DumpDefender to members of the government in the coming weeks.

In a statement to TCJ, the Minister said: "This is a proud moment for our Islands and a testament to the talent, creativity, and ingenuity of our young people. By applying their STEM knowledge to a local environmental challenge, these students have demonstrated the value of innovative thinking and the potential of young people to make a meaningful contribution to their communities." The students, she said, had "literally put Cayman on the map", having told her that the Cayman Islands does not currently appear on the maps the organisers use. She commended Dart for its continued investment in the programme and thanked the mentors for their time.