CU Rover Team
CU Rover Team
The University Rover Challenge is a yearly competition hosted by the Mars Society and held in Hanksville, Utah with the aim to promote human exploration and settlement on Mars.
This competition specifically focuses on rovers that could possibly one day assist astronauts on the Martian surface. This multi-day event is composed of four missions that bring many aspects of engineering, biology, and geology together to design the best and most most capable rover!
Duration: 30-60 mins
Disciplines: geology, astrobiology, mining.
Our journey throughout the solar system has lead us to the question: is
there life somewhere else other than on Earth? In this particular
mission, our rover investigates multiple sites of mineralogical
and biological interest to detect life using its custom on-board laboratory.
Duration: 30-60 mins
Disciplines: controls, communications.
The Martian terrain is harsh and often unpredictable. Despite this, the rover must assist humans in delivering and managing equipment. Here, the rover navigates terrain with large boulders, steep slopes, and long drops in the desert.
Duration: 20-45 mins
Disciplines: controls, communications.
The rover assists humans by operating in poorly accessible areas. This mission involves delivering a cached
science sample to a lander and performing maintenance on a mock lander. Some operations include: putting a cache container
inside a drawer and securing it,
undoing latches, typing commands, and operating a
joystick.
Duration: 30-45 mins
Disciplines: AI, computer vision, communications.
To reduce the need for full teleoperation, autonomy facilitates task execution on foreign planet. The rover navigates autonomously
between legs marked with AR tags. Each stage's GPS location decreases in
accuracy and becomes more difficult to acces.