Swiss and Polish Presidents at EPFL

On the 28th of Mai 2026, EPFL welcomed President Karol Nawrocki of Poland and President Guy Parmelin of the Swiss Confederation in Lausanne, as part of a two-day state visit marking the strong and growing ties between the two countries. Alongside EPFL President Anna Fontcuberta i Morral, the two delegations made their way through campus, and one of their stops was SPOT, where EPFL Xplore had been invited to give a short presentation of our work.

A stage we don’t usually get

We’re used to presenting our work to sponsors and engineers. Presenting it to two heads of state, in front of a wall of cameras and both delegations, is a different kind of pressure. Still, it’s exactly the kind of moment that reminds you why the association exists in the first place.

We walked the presidents through what EPFL Xplore is built on: education, competition, and research, the three pillars that take a student from a lecture hall to designing hardware that has to survive a Martian-analog desert or fly untethered. We introduced our latest rover, Polaris, built for the European Rover Challenge 2026, and our drone, Nox.

Handing over the controller

Presenting is one thing. Letting someone drive your rover is another. At the end of the demo, we handed the gamepad to the presidents and let them take Polaris for a spin, right there in SPOT. Nothing scripted about it, just a machine built by students that actually works and responds when you push the stick. Both leaned in to look at the controls, asking how it steered, how far the signal reached.

They stayed engaged the whole time, asking questions, wanting to understand not just what the rover does but why we build it in the first place. It came across clearly that this isn’t only an engineering exercise: it’s how students pick up practical, hands-on skills years before setting foot in industry.

Later in the visit, delegates from SPOT also toured our prototyping building, where our mechanical and electronics workshops run day in, day out, the less visible side of everything that ends up on stage.

More than a photo

A visit like this is never about one stop. But our part of it carried its own message: that Swiss-Polish cooperation in research and innovation needs exactly this kind of ecosystem, and that student associations like EPFL Xplore are a real piece of that pipeline. Engineers aren’t only made in classrooms. It was a short visit, but a good one, and a reminder that the rover currently covered in dust marks from testing has, for one day, been presidential-approved.