yonder rover

I spent a lot of time during my undergrad at UCSD working on Yonder Dynamics, an engineering project team focusing on building a Mars Rover for the University Rover Challenge.

2022 Rover

2023 Rover

From a high level, these rovers are of a medium size (must fit in a 4" cube and weigh less than 110 lbs) and moderate budget (total price <$18k USD). The competition is only slightly modified every year, so the same rovers can be re-used/upgraded by teams year-to-year. There are two main stages to the competition. The first is the Systems Acceptance Review (SAR), a video submission due in early March. The 36 teams with the best SAR qualify for the main event in early June: the URC finals at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in Hanksville, Utah.

Hanksville has a population of just about 200, and is in one of the most remote regions of Utah. There is enough infrastructure nearby to eat, sleep, get gas, and not much else - as such, a huge component of the final competition is in the preparation before getting to Hanksville, in which you must try to minimize how many things are going to break, and ensure you’re bringing enough stuff to fix all the things that will inevitably break. The emphasis on preparation is even more extreme when you realize that you only have one chance to do each of the four ‘missions’ at the competition. If you get caught off guard, you will more than likely score 0 points on one or all of the missions (this happens for over a dozen of the 36 teams pretty much every year).

The two videos below are Yonder’s SAR submissions for the 2022 and 2023 URC seasons, and give a good high-level understanding of what we put together during these two years.

We scored well on these videos (particularly the second one) and qualified for the URC both of these years. (in fact, Yonder has qualified for the URC 6 of the 7 years that it has existed). Of course, these videos are just demonstrations of what rovers should do, aided by the veil of numerous takes and editing into a polished video.

As implied by those videos, the actual tasks each rover must do are split into 4 different missions:

Extreme Delivery (perform simple tasks on larger objects while traversing rough terrain over long distances),
Equipment Servicing (perform precise tasks that require fine control),
Science (collect and image samples to determine the presence of life),
Autonomous (navigate autonomously over rough terrain to increasingly more difficult-to-find posts).

All challenges except Autonomous are teleoperated by drivers who cannot see the rover themselves, and instead must completely drive using video feeds from the rover. During Autonomous, there are also human operators who monitor the rover’s progress over cameras and are allowed also occasionally program the rover in designated areas (much more like an actual Mars rover).