After the most competitive System Acceptance Review (SAR) milestone in the competition’s history, 36 teams from 10 countries have been selected as finalists to compete at the 2019 University Rover Challenge (URC), held May 30 – June 1 at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in Utah!
In each of URC’s 13 years, the student teams have continued to innovate and challenge each other to build the most advanced Mars rover possible. The SAR is a competitive milestone in which teams’ scores are compared, and only the top 36 teams advance. In 2019 an astounding 53 teams scored above the qualification standard from the previous year.
Teams will now spend the next two and a half months refining their rovers and conducting advanced testing to prepare themselves for the field competition in one of the most extreme and Mars-like environments on Earth!
The Mars Society is excited to welcome the Nissan Advanced Technology Center – Silicon Valley (NATC-SV) as a sponsor of the 2024 University Rover Challenge. Based in Santa Clara, Calif., NATC-SV is the center of global excellence for Artificial Intelligence and next-generation mobility solutions at Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. Researchers and scientists at the center study all areas of automotive research, from the use of AI for developing new battery materials to the design of new systems on a chip for the… READ MORE >
The Mars Society is pleased to announce that Kevin Sloan, Director of the Mars Society’s University Rover Challenge (URC), and several student team participants will be joining Red Planet Live host Ashton Zeth on Tuesday, August 15th (5:00 pm PT) to talk about the recent rover competition held in Utah, robotics, and STEM education. Launched in 2006, URC is the world’s premier robotics competition consistently drawing talented and promising university students from around the world. Held annually in the desert of… READ MORE >
After 3 days of incredible competition, the 2023 University Rover Challenge (URC2023) crowned a new champion, Team Mountaineers from West Virginia University in the U.S.! This was the first URC podium finish for Team Mountaineers, and the second consecutive victory by a team from the United States. Also for the second consecutive year Monash Nova Rover (Monash University, Australia) finished in second place. The BYU Mars Rover team from Brigham Young University (USA) finished in third place. Team Mountaineers (West… READ MORE >