The University Rover Challenge (URC) by the Mars Society is a robotics competition for university level students that challenges teams to design and build a rover that would be of use to early explorers on Mars. The competition is held annually at the Mars Desert Research Station, outside Hanksville, Utah in the United States. The site was selected by the Mars Society for its geographic similarity to Mars: In addition to being a largely barren desert area, the soil in the area has a chemical composition similar to Martian soil. The competition has also expanded internationally to include the European Rover Challenge, Canadian International Rover Challenge, and the Indian Rover Challenge as part of the Rover Challenge Series.
The aim of the University Rover Challenge is to encourage students to develop skills in robotics, improve the state-of-the-art in rovers, and work in multi-disciplinary teams with collaboration between scientists and engineers. The competition was launched in 2006 with competitions held annually every summer since 2007.
History
Inception
The URC was first established in 2006 with the goal of promoting STEM education and inspiring the next generation of space explorers. Since its inception, the competition has grown in scale and significance, attracting teams from universities and institutions worldwide.
The idea behind the URC's creation is that the kinds of rovers teams are building would assist astronauts in the field, controlled remotely by another astronaut. This imagined use case drives the competition's emphasis on teleoperation and ability to perform tasks that a human might need to. (Such as equipment servicing and retrieval and delivery)
In its first year, only 4 teams competed: University of Nevada Reno, Brigham Young University, Penn State University, and University of California Los Angeles. There were only 2 tasks, a Science Task, and a task to deploy a mock radio repeater in the field. URC spokesperson Kevin Sloan says they were unsure what to expect, but were "blown way by the quality". University of Nevada Reno won that year, winning a $5000 cash prize, which was reduced to $1000 in subsequent years.
Evolution of Tasks
Since its inception in 2006, with 4 US teams, the competition has grown substantially, with 95 teams from 12 countries in 2018, and a total of 35 rovers selected to compete, their teams totaling more than 500 students.
The tasks have also undergone significant changes over the years, evolving from the 2 simple tasks of the first year to the 4 robust tasks of 2019, and continuing to get more challenging every year. Detailed information about years 2007 - 2009 is unavailable, but by 2010 there were 4 tasks: Sample Return, Site Survey, Equipment Servicing, and Emergency Navigation. In its 2010 incarnation, sample return involved choosing a sample to bring back with the rover, then doing analysis on it at the base and presenting to the judges on its scientific significance. Site survey involved analysis of a site from potentially far away. Equipment servicing most notably required teams to plug in a 3-prong plug into an outlet, and emergency navigation was a timed challenge in which rovers were to locate astronauts as fast as possible. In addition to these tasks teams scored points on a presentation they gave to judges on the design of their rover.
The following two years saw tweaks in the content of tasks to make them increasingly challenging, but the spirit of each task remained the same. For example, in 2012, the emergency navigation task was designed such that in order to reach some of the astronauts rovers would need to pass into areas where they would lose communication with their operators and thus need to operate autonomously for a time.
In 2013 the Site Survey task was replaced with Terrain Traversing, which tested rovers capability of navigating through difficult terrain. 2016 introduced a formal down-selection process, including a CDR (Critical Design Review) which took the place of the Presentation task, and a semi-finals round of competition. The next year, 2017, replaced Astronaut Assistance with Extreme Retrieval and Delivery (a mix of astronaut assistance and terrain traversing), Sample Return with Science Cache, and Terrain Traversing with Autonomous Traversal, an entirely new challenge which explicitly required teams to implement autonomous behavior on their rovers.
Finally, 2018 and 2019 have seen this task structure preserved, with increases in difficulty and complexity. Notably, the 2019 Science task requires detection of life aboard the rover, whereas in 2018 teams could bring back samples to conduct tests at the base.