Top versus rest

The top five teams by mean total and the bottom ten build the same class of machine: four or six wheels, passive articulation, an arm, a camera mast and a laptop at the command station. What separates them is completion. The two sets differ by 5.2 points in the review and by 44 to 56 points in each of the three hard missions, and the gap in total is 175.9 points. This page compares the two sets, using 23 team-years for the top five and 26 for the bottom ten from the 2022–2026 score sheets.

The two comparison sets

All values are finals team-years, 2022–2026. A team-year enters the means only when it has a finals score; the 25 review-only rows are excluded.

The top five are Missouri S&T, West Virginia, Monash, Michigan and AGH. The bottom ten are Binghamton, KARURA, RoSE, Husky, Cornell, UdeG, RoboJackets, Robocol, Space Concordia and Team Interplanetar. Teams with a single finals appearance are excluded from both sets, so a one-year cameo cannot define the bottom; 18 teams fall into that excluded group S-URC-RESULTS.

A second set checks the first. In 2026 the largest score gap is first to second, 57.16 points, and the second largest is eighth to ninth, 324.59 to 274.91, a 49.68-point step. The eight teams that cleared 300 points therefore form a natural group.

Variance shares

Because total equals the review plus the four missions minus penalties, the exact contribution of each component to the spread of totals is its covariance with the total, and the contributions add to the variance of the total.

The interactive chart shows the pooled 2022–2026 shares. The static figure is a time series, so the two answer different questions: one is the pooled apportionment, the other its stability across ten years.

Where the gap is

The bottom ten is a competent Science team with a broken manipulator and no autonomy. Science has the smallest gap of the four missions, which is why it is the wrong place to look for a differentiator. The 2026 top eight wins by completing: five of them share the same Autonomy score of 86 and the rest of the field averages 14.07 because 16 of 28 scored nothing.

Trajectories

Totals by year for the eight most informative programmes S-URC-RESULTS. An empty cell means the team did not record a finals score that year.

The interactive view plots seven of these programmes, including Yonder Dynamics, on one axis.

Four teams won in five years and eight teams took the fifteen podium places. The biggest sustained climb is UIU, from 13^th in 2022 to 3^rd in 2026 on a within-year z-score change of +1.91; the biggest fall is Sooner, from 7^th to 32^nd. A platform-change year costs a season: Monash rebuilt its arm and its autonomy stack in the same year and fell to 16^th with 18 points in Equipment Servicing and none in Autonomy S-URC-RESULTS.

Consistency

The top five’s year-to-year standard deviation is 52.3 against 26.4 for the bottom ten, and the correlation between a team’s mean total and its spread is +0.56 across the 28 teams with at least three appearances. The most stable totals in the data belong to KARURA at a standard deviation of 5.6 and a mean of 191, TMR at 10.2 and 256, and Project Scorpio at 10.7 and 246, all mid-field or lower. Consistency of the total is not a signature of the elite; consistency of completion is S-URC-RESULTS.

The values on this page