Carleton University’s Planetary Robotics Team won the 2026 Canadian International Rover Challenge in Alberta. The team scored 100 points more than any of the competitors at the event last month, which was held in the badlands near Drumheller: in real numbers, that was 382.19 points for Carleton, against the second-place score of 256.21. “It was a bit crazy,” Owen Davidson, president of the Carleton rover team, told SpaceQ.
It’s common for students on different teams to informally ask each other how they are scoring on different challenges, before the big tally and announcement of the winners. Davidson said there was a sense that Carleton was keeping up, but when the scores came out, the shock at outperforming the competition was real. “A couple of us were, like, ‘Okay, did we do the math correctly?’” said Davidson, also a fourth-year aerospace engineering student.
Their rover outperformed the field on four tasks—a “snack run” to get astronaut items from a competition vending machine, a “heist mission” to recover a simulated stolen artifact, and two tasks relating to food and refreshment delivery to people posing as astronaut crew members.
Davidson paid tribute to the many dozens of students who worked on iterations of the rover since 2013—work that only went on hiatus during the height of the pandemic—as well as support from Carleton’s Faculty of Engineering and Design, particularly for providing professor advice during critical moments such as design reviews.
“It’s a huge team effort. Hours and hours of work and effort that goes into this. We have a leadership group of 14 people, who obviously put in a good bit of their time,” he added, noting many of the students spent anywhere from 20 to 40 hours a week—the equivalent of a part- to full-time job—during some of the more critical phases of the rover build.
This year’s Carleton team had between 60 and 80 participants across multiple disciplines, depending on the week, focused on building a rover to meet the requirements of both the University Rover Challenge in Utah (this past May)—where Carleton placed 23rd in a field of 116—and then the Drumheller competition.
The rover—due to competition limits in both countries—has to fit into a 1.2-metre cube, cost less than $24,000 USD ($34,000 CAD) and weigh below 50 kg. Carleton’s version is a four-wheeled suspension rover, newly sporting an independent steering system so that each wheel can do a solo turn of 90 degrees (plus or minus). The arm has six degrees of freedom and an end effector, with a working envelope of 1 meter by 1 meter by 1.2 meters.
Parts are mostly manufactured and designed by students, using off-the-shelf components; Davidson estimates the rover cost $20,000 USD (~$28,000 CAD), with costs including operations being roughly $60,000 CAD. Sponsorships, discounts, Carleton’s support and other sources provided roughly $30,000 to $40,000 CAD of that number; students themselves figure out much of the rest.
Most of the arm testing took place at Carleton itself (in a design bay of the Engineering Design Centre, a newer addition to the decades-old Mackenzie Engineering Building on campus). The rover was put on trials on the campus, which has ample lawns and grounds, as well as nearby locations such as Brewer Park, the Canadian government’s Central Experimental Farm, and Canadian company Mission Control’s interior moon-like rover yard. Other support came from companies like MHI and STL.
After all this—conscientious of costs—a selection of students personally drove the rover to the two competition locations, which are both dozens of hours from Ottawa, attempting to stay with team members’ friends and family en route to save on hotels. Drumheller, for example, was a 36-hour trip from Ottawa.
Some of the lessons the team implemented from past iterations of the rover included: more reliability for items such as electrical connections, adding new systems such as more camera systems and the independent steering, and switching to a newer robotic arm—with linear actuators instead of hydraulics—to improve on speed and range.
Going forward, the team wants to do it again on a first-principles approach: “Go the smart engineering way, and slowly iterate on things,” Davidson said. Several first- and second-year engineering students are already on board, attracted both by the recent win and the chance to put into practice the theory from their classes. An intro meeting on Sept. 16 (the night before the interview) attracted 200 new members, all told.
Davidson—fresh off a 16-month co-op at Gastops—noted that past members of the rover team got industry positions among their sponsors, which gives him hope that he can also find work in the quickly growing Canadian space industry once he graduates.
“I didn’t come into aerospace engineering thinking I was going to be interested in the whole planetary robotics, service robotics in general. This has really given me an interest in that,” he said of the rover work.