Romanian students win awards for solar car and AI research

Romanian students have achieved significant recognition in the fields of sustainable engineering and artificial intelligence. The SOLIS team from the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca won the SAB 2026 national scholarship competition with Hyperion, Romania’s first solar car. The vehicle weighs 194 kilograms, can reach speeds of 120 km/h, and features six square meters of solar panels alongside a 3 kWh lithium-ion battery. The team previously participated in the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge in Australia.

In the field of AI, students from the Babeș-Bolyai University Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics were honored at the BRAIT 2026 (Best Romanian AI Thesis Awards) competition. Mihai-Bogdan Deaconu received the ‘Best Thesis Award’ in the undergraduate section for research on geometry-aware topology reasoning for autonomous driving. Other students also received distinctions and honorable mentions for work involving machine learning pipelines for medical risk prediction and neural network optimization.