The problem

The 2025 edition of WRO Future Engineers, the same competition vTitan entered in 2026: a robot that operates autonomously in a modelled environment, with the engineering written up to a standard.

Approach

Offloaded inference on a Hailo-8 NPU so detection stayed inside the control loop, with RPLidar handling navigation.

What I wanted to learn

Whether an edge NPU is worth the complexity at this scale. The short answer was yes: inference ran at around 30 fps.