WVU students win second place in international Mars rover competition
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (WBOY) — A team of West Virginia University (WVU) students took home second place in an international competition over the weekend to build 'next generation' Mars rovers and test them in the field.
This year, the University Rover Challenge (URC) brought together 114 teams from 15 countries to compete at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, which has terrain similar to the real Martian surface.
According to a press release from WVU's Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources, this is the third year in a row where WVU's Team Mountaineers' placed in the top two, following a second-place finish in 2024 and a first-place finish in 2023.
Professor Yu Gu, the team's faculty advisor, said in the release that the team focused its efforts on 'refining last year's knowledge while fixing key issues.'
'This year, under the outstanding leadership of [Connor Mann] and [Jalen Beeman], the students represented WVU well against teams from around the world,' Gu said. 'This real-world engineering experience is what makes robotics competition an invaluable educational experience for students.'
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The competition judges the performance of a team's rover through four different 'missions': science, delivery, equipment servicing and autonomous navigation. Teams performed tasks like analyzing soil for signs of microbial life, delivering samples and navigating difficult terrain.
'The most rewarding part was seeing our hard work and dedication pay off when stacked against the best in the world,' Jalen Beeman said, a team leader and computer science and electrical engineering student at WVU. 'Robotics is hard, so we've also been trying to lower the barrier for entry to the competition by open-sourcing our designs. At the competition, we had the chance to speak to several teams that used our designs which was very rewarding.'
To read the full release on Team Mountaineers' finish at this year's URC competition, visit the WVU website, or go here to learn more about the University Rover Challenge.
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