At the national finals of the 2026 China-U.S. Young Maker Competition hosted by the Ministry of Education, the team from the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) won first prize in the main track.

SUSTech’s award-winning team consists of PhD student Le HUANG and Master’s students Qirong LEI, Jinglei NIE, and Siying PU from the Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, under the guidance of Shuxiang GUO, an Academician of the Japan Engineering Academy and a Chair Professor at SUSTech. The award-winning project is “Sea-Sky Strider: A Unified-Powertrain Triphibious Robot for Offshore Facility Inspection and Maintenance.” “Sea-Sky Strider” integrates the functions of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), and a wheeled robot, fundamentally breaking the “triphibious dilemma” and enabling seamless operations across all domains. The device uses an integrated fuselage propulsion streamline design combined with a rotor-arm integration, allowing autonomous buoyancy control without dedicated flotation materials, paired with a dual-medium propeller vector thrust module, making a single power system compatible with air, land, and underwater.

The China-U.S. Young Maker Competition has been successfully held thirteen times since it was launched by the Ministry of Education in 2014. As the top-level maker competition for youth exchanges between China and the U.S., the contest has been consistently included in the results list of the high-level China-U.S. cultural exchange consultations and was selected in 2020 as an A-level event in the “National Ranking of Discipline Competitions in General Higher Education Institutions” by the China Association of Higher Education.

This edition of the competition brought together over 400 universities and more than 14,000 young participants nationwide, collecting over 3,200 innovative projects. After multiple rounds of selection across 14 regional divisions, 120 teams made it to the finals. The event, themed “Co-making the Future,” focused on global development issues like clean energy, ecological operations and maintenance, and public livelihoods. Projects were evaluated on innovation, technical feasibility, social impact, industry prospects, and cross-cultural collaboration, providing a national-level platform for young people from China and the U.S. to engage in international innovation dialogue and learn from each other.

The awarding ceremony for this competition also includes the China-U.S. People-to-People Exchange Awards, and Professor Xiaohua SUN from SUSTech’s School of Design is on the list.