Skip to content
Statistics

Teams and hardware

The 68 teams in the census made 187 appearances across five score sheets, and 62 of them recorded at least one finals score. Experience is the strongest descriptive variable in the dataset: teams that reached five finals averaged 303.9 points against 179.6 for a single appearance. That gradient is survivorship as much as learning, and the cleaner experiment is the first-time finalist, whose 2026 mean of 161.1 sits far below the 259.2 of the returning teams. A profile page exists for 51 of the 68 teams, and the hardware record is strongest for the four programmes below.

68Teams in the census51 with a profile page2022–2026S-CENSUS
13Teams in all five editions11 scored finals every year2022–2026S-CENSUS
161.1Mean total, first-time finalistsAgainst 259.2 for the 30 returning teams2026S-URC26-SCORES
303.9Mean total, five appearancesAgainst 179.6 for one appearance2022–2026S-URC-RESULTS

Key takeaways

  • Experience is a survivorship gradient. Mean total rises from 179.6 with one finals appearance to 303.9 with five, but that reflects teams good enough to keep returning, not a 124-point learning curve.
  • First-timers finish in the bottom half. In 2026 the six first-time teams took ranks 22, 26, 32, 34, 35 and 36, and no first-time team finished in the top half.
  • Hardware has converged and the choice does not predict score. Nine of the eleven teams with public code use ROS 2, and the deliberate exception, Missouri S&T, won in 2025 and 2026 with a custom stack.
  • Completion is the shared trait of the best programmes. Every top-eight team in 2026 scored all four missions; the arm, mobility and perception choices below them are variations on one architecture.

Experience

Finals appearances Teams Team-years Mean total Mean rank percentile
1 18 18 179.6 80th
2 16 32 218.8 61st
3 11 33 224.2 60th
4 6 24 231.0 58th
5 11 55 303.9 29th

Values for the 62 teams with a finals score, 2022–2026 S-URC-RESULTS. The percentile is the mean position within each year’s field.

Thirteen of the 68 census teams appear in all five editions, and eleven of them recorded a finals score every year. At the other end, 18 teams made a single appearance. The gradient is best read as who returns rather than what experience buys: a team that keeps returning is one that was good enough to keep funding travel and recruiting.

The first-time finalist is the cleaner comparison. In 2026 the six teams with no prior finals row averaged 161.1 against 259.2 for the 30 returners, and none finished in the top half. In 2024 eight first-time teams took ranks 23 to 34. The exception is instructive: Legendary Rover finished 5th on its first appearance in the 2022–2026 window, but the team has URC history back to 2014 S-URC-RESULTS.

The four best-documented programmes

Missouri S&T West Virginia Monash UIU
Middleware Custom C++20 and RoveComm, no ROS ROS 1 to ROS 2 ROS 2 with Nav2 ROS 2 with Nav2
Autonomy path C++ rewrite, LiDAR and satellite terrain SLAM, A* and DWA; 14 to 86 between 2022 and 2026 Hybrid A* 70, Nav2 0, Smac 14, navfn 86 A* and EKF, RTK from 2024; 34 to 86
Competition mass Not published 33.0 kg in 2023, with the arm Not weighed; CAD sums 24.4 kg chassis and 6.54 kg arm 47.5 kg in 2026, self-reported
Communications 900 MHz and 2.4 and 5.8 GHz, three links 2.4, 5.8 and 70 cm, 3 m mast, 750 m line of sight and 164 m non-line of sight 2.4 and 5 GHz plus 900 MHz, 3 m mast 915 MHz and 2.4 and 5.8 GHz
Public record Documentation archive, no review document Reviews, budget, code and CAD for three years Open-source monorepo, annual video, no written review Annual video only, no code

Sources for the four columns are the teams’ own published material S-MST-GH-AUTONOMY S-WVU-SAR2026 S-MONASH-GH-NOVA S-UIU-2026-SAR. All four are Tier A and all four finished in the top eight in 2026, so the table describes what the winners do, not what the rest fail to do.

What the hardware record shows

Middleware is convergent and not decisive. Nine of the eleven teams with public code use ROS 2 somewhere, but Missouri S&T won 2025 and 2026 on a custom UDP and TCP protocol and a C# base station. Planner sophistication did not track score either: Monash’s custom hybrid-A* scored 70 in 2023, a ground-up Nav2 rebuild scored 0 in 2024, a state-lattice version scored 14 in 2025 and a conservative Nav2 stack scored 86 in 2026. UMD Loop publishes the most canonical Nav2 configuration in the corpus and finished 32nd of 36 in 2026 S-URC26-SCORES S-MONASH-SAR2024 S-MONASH-SAR2026.

Wheel count follows the mass budget. Six wheels with passive articulation is the norm, but UIU dropped from six wheels to four in 2026 explicitly to overcome mass constraints and maximise payload capacity, and moved from 6th to 3rd. The choice is a trade, not a doctrine S-UIU-2026-SAR.

Every documented top team runs two or more independent link planes. Non-line-of-sight range collapses to about one-fifth of line-of-sight in the teams’ own measurements: 850 to 300 m in 2023 and 750 to 164 m in 2026. Communications is also the subsystem the judges name as the most common cause of a motionless rover S-WVU-SAR2023 S-WVU-SAR2026 S-URC-ADVICE.

Most teams do not publish a mass. Four of the eight Tier A teams publish a total mass, Monash only for its 2021 rover, and one of the five champions. Missouri S&T publishes none anywhere in its public record. That absence limits what any comparison of hardware can claim S-CENSUS.

Mean total against year-to-year standard deviation for 28 teams
Each team’s mean final total against the standard deviation of its finals totals, for the 28 teams with at least three appearances. Better teams are more variable, not less: the fit has a slope of +0.15 points of standard deviation per point of mean total. Sample: 28 teams with three or more finals appearances, 2022–2026.Robotics Club @ Mississippi State University, 2026. Original analysis. S-URC-RESULTS Full resolution
2026 Autonomy score against final rank
Autonomy score against final rank for all 36 teams in 2026. Five teams sit exactly on 86 and they are exactly the top five; 16 teams sit on zero. The remaining values are 58, 44, 35.2, 30 and 12. Sample: 36 teams, 2026.Robotics Club @ Mississippi State University, 2026. Original analysis. S-URC26-SCORES Full resolution
Loading chart…

The 2026 Autonomy block is the clearest capability signal in the data. Five teams scored exactly 86 and they are exactly ranks 1 to 5; 16 teams scored zero. The top eight scored all four missions, which is what “having autonomy” looked like at the top in 2026.

The team register

Loading table…

The values on this page

Statistic Value Definition Period Sample Source Chart and chapter
Teams 68 Distinct teams in the sheets 2022–2026 187 rows S-CENSUS The 68-team census
Teams with a finals score 62 At least one row with mission scores 2022–2026 187 rows S-URC-RESULTS Results explorer
Five appearances 13 teams, 55 team-years Teams in all five editions 2022–2026 68 teams S-CENSUS The field
Mean total, one appearance 179.6 Mean of single-appearance teams 2022–2026 18 teams S-URC-RESULTS Top versus rest
Mean total, five appearances 303.9 Mean of five-appearance teams 2022–2026 11 teams S-URC-RESULTS Top versus rest
First-time finalists, 2026 161.1 Mean total against 259.2 for returners 2026 6 teams S-URC26-SCORES Chart above; The field

Evidence note

The experience gradient is a survivorship pattern: the dataset cannot separate learning from selection, because teams that stop returning are absent from later years. “First appearance in the dataset” is not “first URC team”, since several teams have pre-2022 history outside these sheets. The hardware comparison rests on four Tier A profiles and eleven teams with public code, so counts describe documented teams and never the full field.

Sources for this page

  1. S-URC-RESULTSURC official scores 2022–2026, compiled CSVThe Mars Society / URC, 2022–2026.Print copy
  2. S-MST-GH-AUTONOMYAutonomy_Software README, C++20, GPL-3.0, OpenCV 4.11 / PyTorch 2.2.2 / CUDA 12.2 / ZED SDK 4.1, Ubuntu 22.04 + JetPack 6, Docker + CIMRDT.Original
  3. S-WVU-SAR2026Team Mountaineers System Acceptance Review 2026 (rover "Deimos"): tri-modal 2.4 GHz + 5.8 GHz + 70 cm, gimbal camera on antenna mast, 750 m LOS / 164 m NLOS high-noise test, antenna + radio budget linesWVU Team Mountaineers, 2026.Original
  4. S-MONASH-GH-NOVAMonashNovaRover/nova, "The Monash Nova Rover mono-repo" (Apache-2.0; default branch main; 2,389 files; last push 2026-10-23)Monash Nova Rover, 2024-09 → 2026-10 (repo life).Original
  5. S-UIU-2026-SARUIU Mars Rover, SAR 2026 (video; AURION, 6-wheel to 4-wheel rocker transition, spring pivot, carbon-core wheel)UIU Mars Rover Team, 2026-02-28 (upload).Original
  6. S-URC26-SCORESURC2026 Official ScoresURC, 2026-05/06.Original Archived copy
  7. S-MONASH-SAR2024Monash Nova Rover, URC SAR 2024 (video, 5:07)Monash Nova Rover, 2024-03-01.Original
  8. S-MONASH-SAR2026Monash Nova Rover, URC SAR 2026 (video, 5:09)Monash Nova Rover, 2026-03 (uploaded).Original
  9. S-WVU-SAR2023Team Mountaineers System Acceptance Review 2023 (rover "Wanderer"): Cambium PTP 450 900 MHz link, 850 m LOS / 300 m NLOS, 2 m telescoping mast, drone 900 MHz + 2.4 GHzWVU Team Mountaineers, 2023.Original
  10. S-URC-ADVICEURC Advice (judges' systems-engineering lessons)URC judges and staff.Original Archived copy
  11. S-CENSUSURC team census, master index (68 teams, 187 team-year rows, tiers, documentation test)Compiled from official team pages and score sheets, 2026-10-25.Print copy