28 January 2022 0 Comments

🚀 Introduction to URC

“That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” - Neil Armstrong

On 4th October 1957 began a promising journey that assured humans to explore this fathomless sky and not just be limited to the soil they were born in. What began with thrill, stimulation, blaze, rush, surge, and yet a tint of fear and twitchiness has taken a colossal form of a never-ending journey to quench man’s thirst for knowing what lies behind the sun, moon, planets and the stars and every phenomenon that till date has seemed bizarre!

So why not we also set ablaze our inner curiosity and novelty and contribute our small part in this never-ending journey of exploring the matter around our earth! Growing as a wizkid, we all have wandered and longed for long on how to touch the sky and step our small steps on this outer world that spreads so wide! The sun, the moon, planets and these fascinating planets have become so much more than the protagonist in those long-lost hearsay tales. The dark shady wrinkles of the moon have fascinated us for so long! And haven’t that red planet in the evening sky seemed to you like an eternal piece of facts and mysteries waiting to be deciphered! With never-ending questions, comes never-ending answers that may or may not quench our thirst and the rash to know more and more keeps running in a never-ending loop!

With too many mysterious tales scattered in the sky, how does the idea of sending your small Rover ring in your ear? With immeasurable excitement comes unanswered questions with the uncertainty of how what and whys. But isn’t this curiosity to know the back-end of “Curiosity(2012)” surges you to look for its possibility? What if you could know the extremities of a Rover? What if you knew the algorithms this vehicle is bounded by? What if you got to be part of the team working on these colossal sides?

Doesn’t this excite you enough to know more and more about the process.

To answer all our such queries and excitement, “The Mars Society” organizes a yearly event by the name of “University Rover Challenge”(URC) for all university students to exhibit their skill and talent by providing them with an international platform where they can compete with others and design a rover and build the next generation of Mars rovers that will one day work alongside astronauts exploring the Red Planet. 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 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 iand engineers. The competition was launched in 2006 with competitions held annually every summer since 2007.

🕛 Timeline

Although it takes a lot of effort and a huge amount of time to make something as grand as a Mars rover history has shown time and time again that a good deadline and brilliant people is all it takes to build great projects.

Following the same spirit, the Mars Society organises this challenge every year so as to allow for a goal for students who are either building such a rover or have built but want to improve and showcase it. The registrations for the 2022 University rover challenge were opened in the following window.

💸 September 2021 - October 27th 2021

After successful registration there are three stages to the competition namely:

📄 Preliminary Design review stage - December 3, 2021

🔭 System Acceptance Review Stage - March 4, 2022

🚀 Field Competition - June 1 - June 4, 2022

Now you know the competition and its deadlines so the time comes to understand the main rounds. Every year the Mars society releases a set of guidelines for the competition explaining each round in detail [Guidlines2021](https://urc.marssociety.org/home/requirements-guidelines). Here is the watered-down explanation of the rounds for you!

📄 PDR Review Phase

This is the first round of the challenge after the registration of the team has been completed. The teams are supposed to submit a Preliminary Design report which is supposed to shed light on the team management plan, the project timeline plan, how many resources are available for the project and from where are those resources coming. The technical details are generally kept brief all the while allowing the reader to have a higher-level understanding of the technologies and methods used in rovers.

The guidelines for the 2022 URC challenge PDR round are given here.

🔭 SAR Review Phase

After establishing your feat in the first round now it’s time to flaunt off your Mars Rover in front of all the teams gathered internationally. Now it’s time for the teams to put forward their diligent work and prove their worth among all the teams that have come to witness the making of the best Mars Rover.

SAR or System Acceptance Review is the first competitive phase wherein teams are evaluated not only on the basis of their months’ toil but also on their counterparts. Teams are judged against each other and the best 36 teams are selected to compete in URC Finals. That’s how your team might get a ticket to the USA! For SAR, teams are required to submit two components: a video presentation and a SAR Report.SAR Reports are limited to 6 pages of text and graphics while SAR Videos are limited to a single video that is no longer than 5 minutes. For more details and guidelines for the URC 2022 SAR phase, refer to this.

🚀 Field Competition

This is the final, predominant and prime round we’ll have been waiting for days. This is the round that has been triggering us to work day and night and motivated us to build a closely-knit group that was eager to send their own Mars Rover through this eternal sky to the other planet that has waited too long to be deciphered by us.

This is the culminating yet the most thrilling round of URC that is held around June at the Mars Society’s Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) near Hanksville, Utah, USA. The site has been selected by the Mars Society because of 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. Now it’s time for your Mars Rover to reach its ultimate destination and for your team to feel content at the sight of your Mars Rover being launched in the rough terrain and doing its job profoundly. Let the winner be decided someday, it’s time for you to cherish the intellectual bonds you formed with people from so different backgrounds and worked together to reach where you stand today!

🎙️ How is this relevant to us?

Building a 50Kg six-wheeled rover with a robotic arm that can in sync do a variety of tasks both by being controlled using a controller and autonomously as stated above requires a huge amount of time resources and expertise. So why are we doing this? The simple answer is, it's exciting!

It's a project that requires people from almost every single branch to work in sync towards completing it and hence is the perfect platform to encourage intern-club collaboration as well as bringing like-minded people together. Hard work, all-nighters, and the happiness of seeing parts move as you have decreed await here. The aim is not only to make the rover but for us to meet people whom we can respect and cherish for years to come.

🏗️ What’s Next

The current team has built a solid foundation for the project and is moving forward towards the SAR review stage after clearing the PDR review stage.

In the next coming weeks, we will be releasing blogs, tutorials and other information regarding the project and the aim is for the folks who are interested in this to be ready when the next round of recruitments opens. This project is here to stay and we aim to polish it till we have something that we can proudly show to the world as IIT Mandi’s Mars Rover.