Space Exploration Alberta Robotics: SPEAR (University of Alberta)

SPEAR is a registration record rather than a results record. The University of Alberta team registered for the URC in 2024, 2025 and 2026 without appearing in any finals score sheet, and no finals appearance exists in any year of the record. Its most detailed public account is a 2019 university news piece that describes the qualification funnel from the inside: 97 teams invited to submit a video, and 30 to 35 selected. What the team publishes is process, a build-log video series and one measured result at another competition.

Identity and results

The URC publishes team lists and score sheets but no acceptance list, so a registration without a finals row is the whole record for most absent teams. SPEAR’s attempts are reconstructed from the university’s own reporting, the team channel and the official lists.

The one measured result is the Canadian International Rover Challenge in 2018 at Drumheller, where the team finished 7^th of 11 with a rover the university describes as different from the URC machine S-SPEAR-NEWS2019. The 2019 article puts the group at about 40 active members across engineering and science and says it was two years old, which places its formation around 2017 by inference from that statement S-SPEAR-NEWS2019. Tier C here denotes a registered team with no finals result in the window; the tier rule for teams with results is defined on the census page.

Rover generations

No named generation. No rover name appears in any source reached. The 2019 article refers to “its brand new rover”, and the current site refers to “the next generation of semi-autonomous Mars rovers” S-SPEAR-NEWS2019 S-SPEAR-SITE.

The CIRC rover and the URC rebuild. The team took a first rover to the CIRC, then chose to “rebuild from the ground up”, redesigning the chassis, changing the circuitry and rewriting the code S-SPEAR-UALBERTA. That decision is the closest the public record comes to a generation boundary, and it discards the institutional memory a named platform would carry.

Subsystems

No subsystem is documented at component level. The site names a five-part structure (software, electrical, mechanical, science, administration) and states that the rover is in-house manufactured and fully autonomous; it publishes no specification S-SPEAR-SITE.

Mobility, arm and science. The university project page describes a redesign of the chassis, circuitry and code but gives no wheel count, suspension type, arm axis count, instrument or sample path S-SPEAR-UALBERTA.

Autonomy. The site claims a fully autonomous rover and lists perception among the software work; no stack, sensor or scored autonomy run is published S-SPEAR-SITE.

Power and communications. No battery, bus, radio or antenna data is published. The build-log episode titles record a crashed rover and a communications failure, which is the only public evidence that either has been a problem S-SPEAR-YT.

Mission performance

There is no URC mission performance to describe. The record is a sequence of attempts.

2018–2020. Three review videos in three consecutive years, on a public channel S-SPEAR-YT.

2019. The closest documented attempt: a video among 97, not selected. The article describes the production, with a storyboard, two weekends of filming that overlapped with testing, and a separate afternoon for voice-overs S-SPEAR-NEWS2019.

2024–2026. Three registrations and three seasons without a score-sheet row. No review video after 2020 is public S-SPEAR-YT.

The competitive focus appears to have moved to the CIRC, which the site now names alongside the URC S-SPEAR-SITE.

Lessons for a first build

• The desk stage is the binding constraint. In 2019, 97 teams were invited to submit a video for 30 to 35 places; the census records about 36 to 38 finalists from roughly 116 registrants a year S-CENSUS. A first build should plan the video as a deliverable with a schedule, not as a recording of whatever is finished.
• Schedule the review production. The 2019 account shows filming spread across two weekends and voice-over work scheduled separately. That is the opposite of a last-minute recording.
• Film the failures. The build-log episodes record a crashed rover and a communications failure S-SPEAR-YT. A first build learns more from that genre than from a highlight film.
• A full rebuild costs memory. “Rebuild from the ground up” after the CIRC is a clean-slate strategy; a named platform is the alternative, and it keeps the lessons that a rebuild discards.
• An unmeasured team is unknown, not weak. No finals result means no evidence either way; a first build should neither copy nor dismiss this programme.

What remains uncertain

Whether a review video was submitted in 2024, 2025 or 2026 is not public; no video after 2020 appears on the team channel. Any CIRC result from 2024 to 2026 is not published, although the team competes there. The rover’s wheels, suspension, arm, science payload, power and communications are all unpublished. The founding year rests on the 2019 article’s statement that the group was two years old, which is reported rather than stated by the team. Current team size is unknown; about 40 members was the 2019 figure.

Team sources

• spaceualberta.ca, the team site with the mission, subteams, sponsors and the two competitions.
• Student Innovation Centre project page, the university’s programme description and work plan.
• Introducing the U of A’s newest space rover, the 2019 news piece with the funnel numbers and the CIRC result.
• SPEAR on YouTube, the 2018–2020 review videos and the build-log series.
• Join page, the team’s recruitment page.