About the Team

Wagner Franco

Captain of the Team

UFRJ Nautilus is an autonomous vehicle competition team from UFRJ. It was created in 2016 in the naval engineering department of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and had the participation of 8 students from different engineering departments. In the same year, we participated for the first time in RoboSub, being the first team in South America to enroll in the largest AUV competition in the world.

In our first participation, the team took Vovozão, the first auv built by Nautilus fully funded by the members, but we were unable to compete for problems in transporting the robot. 2017 was a year of rebuilding the team and the auvs. With some sponsorships and a greater number of members from different courses, our team developed its new auv, BR-Hue, which reached 27th place in the 2018 competition and in the 2019 semifinals.

During the pandemic, even in isolation, our members continued to develop their projects, winning the 9th place and the Holding Steady award at RoboSub 2020. Also this year, we developed our third auv and expanded our area of operation, migrating from a team of autonomous underwater vehicles to a autonomous vehicle team, with the addition of an autonomous drone project.

Currently, we have the participation of more than forty members of several courses at UFRJ, divided into five areas of activity: Management, Marketing, Electronics, Hydrodynamics and Mechanics and Software. We continue to value teamwork, in an effort to produce cutting-edge Brazilian technology that is easy to access.