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HANKSVILLE, Wayne County — University students from around the globe have come to southern Utah to participate in the University Rover Challenge, including a team from Brigham Young University.
The URC, organized by The Mars Society, is a robotics competition for college students that “challenges student teams to design and build the next generation of Mars rovers,” according to URC’s website. The goal is for the students to build rovers that can successfully navigate the terrain of Mars, potentially working side-by-side with astronauts on the Red Planet.
The competition is held in the desert of southern Utah because it visually resembles the surface of Mars. The rover tasks include a sample return task, a terrain traversing task, an astronaut assistant task, an equipment servicing task and a presentation task.
Michael Bouchard from Rolla, Missouri, said his team, like the couple dozen other teams in the competition, hope to see their ideas one day make it to the Red Planet. But the competition is stiff.
“The idea is that very few robots actually make it to the Red Planet,” Bouchard said.
On Thursday, Bouchard’s team worked against the clock to get its robot out on the rocky terrain. Each team gets 30 minutes to set up and 30 more minutes for the rover to complete the task.
It’s tough for the setup teams to set up their robots, then watch the robot’s progress on a computer screen, hoping the rest of their team can control the rover.
“It’s very hard because we see everything, but our friends just have two cameras,” said Radek Lawrnowic from Warsaw University of Technology.
He watched anxiously as his team directed its rover to pick up a soil sample.
“And when I see that they’ve almost got the sample, it’s like, ‘Oh, go, go, go, a little bit, like just right,’ ” said Adrain Dolecki, also on the Warsaw University of Technology team.
While the teams are competing today, they’re also working toward the same goal — helping put man on Mars.
“That’s really cool, because it shows just how global this idea is,” Bouchard said.
The URC competition started Thursday and ends on Saturday.
