Student teams from across the world are coming together this week to demonstrate their chops at building, programming, and operating Mars rovers. From May 27th to 30th the teams are heading to Mars Society’s Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) near Hanksville in Utah, for the 2026 University Rover Challenge.
While there, their rovers will be evaluated on their ability to accomplish a variety of missions that are based on the same kind that rovers would be performing on the Martian surface while assisting human Mars explorers.
According to URC, 116 teams from 18 countries expressed their interest in competing for a spot in the finals. Teams had to submit both written reports and video demonstrations of their rovers for the System Acceptance Review back in March, which were then scored by URC’s judges.
Ultimately, 38 teams were chosen to be finalists and to travel to Utah for the finals in order to demonstrate their rovers’ capabilities in person. Teams from across the globe were chosen, including teams from Australia, India, Japan, Italy, Mexico, Poland, South Korea, Turkey, the United States, Bangladesh, and Canada.
Canada, for its part, had four teams chosen to be finalists. The teams included Space Concordia’s Robotics Division (SCRB), Robotics for Space Exploration from the University of Toronto, Queen’s Space Engineering Team, and the Carleton Planetary Robotics Team (CPRT).
SpaceQ was able to get in touch with the Carleton and Concordia teams; and while they were understandably busy, they were able to provide some comments on their teams and their rovers.
The Rover Challenge missions
There are four main missions that the teams will be attempting to complete, according to the rules of the Challenge. Notably, the teams will not just be employing a rover for the task; they were also encouraged to add a rotary-wing drone to assist, similar to the kind that might be used in actual Martian missions.
(The Carleton team said that adding the drone was a top priority after their experiences during last year’s URC. Alex Yorston, CPRT’s VP External, said that the Carleton drone team was “the newest addition to the club,” and became its own official team just this year.)
The first URC task is a Science Mission; the teams are required to “collect sample(s) chosen by the team at site(s) selected in the field, perform basic science evaluation of these samples with onboard instrumentation, and store at least one sample as a cache.” The overall goal is to test the sample for its potential to support microbial life, but the teams were also encouraged to have their rovers use cameras to investigate the area.
The second task is a Delivery Mission; one where “rovers shall be required to assist astronauts in the field, such as by finding, picking up, and delivering objects, all while traversing terrain of increasing difficulty.” Notably, while the teams are allowed and encouraged to use a drone, they are not allowed to use “mobile deployable systems” (mini-rovers) to help with the task.
The mission is a multi-stage affair, where the rovers need to travel through difficult terrain, open boxes, carry lightweight objects like hand tools, read signs, and find equipment, often relying primarily on Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) coordinates.
The third mission, the Equipment Servicing Mission, has some similar elements; rovers will be required to pick up sample tubes and cache containers and carry them to a mock-up lander, where they’ll also open drawers and panels on the lander, turn levers, push buttons, and connect a hose from a fuel tank to a lander.
One unique aspect, though, is the autonomous typing component. The teams will be given a 3-6 letter launch key prior to the mission, which they will program into their rover. After that point, the rover must autonomously and accurately type on an actual vertically mounted physical keyboard to input the launch key into the lander.
Finally, there’s an Autonomous Navigation Mission, to be undertaken “as soon as 10 minutes after the completion of the Equipment Servicing Mission.” In the final mission, the rovers will be required to autonomously traverse to two locations based solely on GNSS navigation and two other locations based on a combination of GNSS and Augmented Reality tags.
The rovers will also be required to spot and navigate to three objects on the ground: an orange rubber mallet, a rock pick hammer, and a standard water bottle, avoiding obstacles along the way. Unlike with previous missions, they won’t need to interact with these objects, but will need to use imagery to prove that their rover intentionally navigated to them.
Each event, along with the initial System Acceptance Review, is worth up to 100 points, for a score up to 500 in total.
Eileen the rover and Carleton’s “Heavily Interdisciplinary” rover team
These are a lot of daunting challenges; how are the Canadian teams approaching them? Carleton and Concordia gave some insights into their teams and their rovers.
Jack Tremblay-Lessard, Mechanical Lead for the Carleton team, told SpaceQ that their rover is called “Eileen”. (“She leans,” he added.) Their team is heavily interdisciplinary: it includes engineering and design students, but also students from biology, earth sciences, computer science and the humanities.
“Anyone excited about robots is welcome and encouraged to join,” Tremblay-Lessard said. Yorston said that “this is still a school club, also made for socializing and making friends, that will last far past graduation.”
Eileen was designed with competitions in mind: both the URC and the CIRC (Canadian International Rover Challenge) play a role in the choices that they made. The mission outlines “give us a plan for rover capabilities that need to be designed, developed, and integrated,” said Will Richards (JR Software Lead), and their team is split into a variety of different sub-teams (software, mechanical, electrical, science, and drone) in order to get it all done on time.
“We work towards these deadlines year-round,” Richards said, with Yorston also saying that “during our design review the missions are always kept in mind.”
While they weren’t able to provide full details about Eileen to SpaceQ, due to the time pressure of the competition, Tremblay-Lessard did provide some information.
Tremblay-Lessard said that the rover has “a 4-wheel rigid suspension system with swerve drive on each wheel” for maximum maneuverability, as well as 3D-printed wheels in TPU (Thermoplastic Polyurethane) that are “super squishy” to absorb terrain shocks. The “fingers” on the arm are also printed in TPU, and the arm itself has six degrees of freedom.
There was also more detail in CPRT’s System Acceptance Review video, including the Science Team’s demonstration of Eileen’s centrally-mounted hammer drill, which extracts soil samples for further analysis regarding potential life signs.
Space Concordia and DEIMOS
Concordia spokesperson Zachary Germain reached out with some comments as well – some made while the team was en route to Utah.
Space Concordia’s team, Germain said, is primarily “undergraduate engineering students united by a common passion for robotics and space technologies”. They see the team as “an outlet through which students can learn hands-on skills and gain project experience with real goals and accelerated deadlines.”
Germain added that the rover team, in particular, has the goal “to remain competitive yet innovative in the space created by the variety of rover challenges”, though he said that other challenges like “real-world and educational research” may be on the table at some point.
Concordia’s rover, DEIMOS, was described by Germain as featuring a “low budget astronaut utility vehicle”, which features a “6-wheel triple-rocker design which can traverse large obstacles and difficult terrain”. The wheels themselves have a “fractal-like spoke design with fully 3D printed hubs and tires,” and Germain said that “URC will be their real test outside of controlled sandboxes.”
DEIMOS can “sport a 6-axis cycloidal arm, a science payload for the aforementioned analysis, and a vision module” depending on the mission. Germain said that the manipulator “is an advanced 6-axis design with custom cycloidal gearboxes for minimal backlash”, and has a gripper made of “compliant material [that can] mold itself to whatever it is grabbing.”
(The team’s System Acceptance Review video gave more detail on the design of their rovers’ interchangeable mission-specific modules.)
Germain also gave some details on their drone, called ARES, which he called “incredibly powerful”. It has 24kg of thrust at max throttle, and is designed as “a scout and a radio repeater for our rover”, allowing for communication outside of line-of-sight.
Owing to the thrust, Germain said that they might be able to add a gripper to the drone to have it help with delivery tasks, though “this is pending its ability to perform this year.”
System Acceptance Review videos for the Queen’s University and University of Toronto teams can be viewed online. As the University Rover Challenge kicks off this week , all eyes will be on these talented Canadian teams as they push their rovers—and themselves—to the limit.