University of Toronto leads Canadian entries at 2026 Mars Rover Competition

Four Canadian teams tried out potential rover technology at a longstanding student challenge in rovers, at a time when surface mobility is more important than ever, with the highest-ranking team in Toronto scoring about midway in a field of dozens of entrants.

The 2026 University Rover Challenge (URC) asked undergraduate and graduate students to test out Mars-like rovers in the desert, simulating conditions on another world. This year, the challenge took place weeks after NASA pivoted its Artemis moon plans to focus more heavily on a lunar base, providing perhaps more opportunity for a Canadian Space Agency-funded lunar utility rover to provide assistance when it arrives there no earlier than 2033.

As such, it will likely be through challenges such as this that future Canadian moon engineers hone their skills. URC is billed as “the world’s premier robotics competition for college students” (which also means universities, as Canadians term it). It is held every year at the Mars Society’s Mars Desert Research Station in rural Utah, which is a proving ground for greenhouses, spacesuits and other space tech – as well as how to run remote missions.

“It’s one of the most important talent pipelines in the aerospace industry,” Doug Milburn, chair of presenting sponsor ProtoSpace, said in a URC statement about the competition. “These students are solving real engineering problems under extreme conditions, and many of them go on to become leaders at companies building the future of space exploration.”

The challenge was launched in 2006 and is held annually in the summer. This year, a record 116 teams from 18 countries applied to join the challenge and their written reports and video demonstrations were sent to URC for a system acceptance review.

From there, judges scored the entries and selected 38 finalist teams to participate between May 27 and 30 – including four from Canada, which were Space Concordia’s Robotics Division, Robotics for Space Exploration from the University of Toronto, Queen’s Space Engineering Team, and the Carleton Planetary Robotics Team. Additionally, it should be noted that sponsors included Canada’s MDA Space – one of the companies working on an early-stage contract for the lunar utility rover, along with Canadensys Aerospace Corporation and Mission Control.

Ultimately, none of the Canadian teams made the top tier of the results, but they did rank pretty well in the group. Toronto was highest at 17^th, Queen’s was 19^th, Carleton’s was 23^rd and Concordia’s placed 31^st, according to the official competition results.

The winning team was the Mars Rover Design Team from the Missouri University of Science and Technology, repeating their championship from last year, with second and third place going to teams in Australia (Monash University) and Bangladesh (United International University), respectively.

Each rover was expected to participate in four missions: a science mission with sample collection, a payload delivery mission simulating work with astronauts (in which using a drone is said to be “advantageous” for teams), an equipment-servicing mission, and an autonomous navigation mission, according to the challenge rules. The results from these missions were combined with the design review to achieve the final score; each event (and the design review) were 100 points, providing a total possible score of 500.

Two of the Canadian teams were able to speak to SpaceQ briefly before the event, providing some details of their rovers, which you can read about here to get more details on the teams’ approach, plans and engineering. Both teams also had drones.

• Carleton’s, called “Eileen”, included a four-wheel rigid suspension system and swerve drives. The wheels were 3D-printed in a type of polyurethane designed for terrain flexibility, and a polyurethane rover arm had six degrees of freedom. Eileen also featured a hammer drill for soil extraction, allowing for samples. The rover is shown in a system acceptance review video.
• Concordia’s, called “DEIMOS”, had a six-wheel design that included spoked wheels with 3D-printed hubs and tires. It also had a six-axis arm, a science payload and a vision module. You can see more in a system acceptance review video the team posted online.
• Similar system acceptance review videos showcasing the other teams’ rovers at Queen’s and the University of Toronto are also available.