Team dossiers

Fifty-one team profiles sit in this part of the reference: 8 in Tier A, 24 in Tier B and 19 in Tier C. Each one follows the same order, from identity and results through to the team’s own sources, so that two profiles can be compared section by section. Every profile exists because the team published enough design material to support it.

What a profile contains

Every dossier follows the same nine sections.

1. Header figures. Tier, country, first and last appearance, best overall result and the number of sources cited.
2. What the team shows. Two to four conclusions from its record.
3. Identity and results. A results table with year, rover, total, rank and the four mission scores.
4. Rover generations. One short entry per year or platform, using the team’s own names.
5. Subsystems. Mobility, arm, science, comms, power and compute, where the evidence exists.
6. Mission performance. What happened in the field and why, taken from reports, videos and news.
7. Lessons for a first build. Three to six causal lessons, not general advice.
8. What remains uncertain. The open questions, rewritten as limits on what is known.
9. Team sources. The team’s site, code archive, videos and papers, in addition to the generated source list.

Sections are as long as the evidence allows. A team that publishes one video and a results row has a short profile, and the shortness is itself the finding.

Tier A: the eight programmes

These are the teams that reached a podium or combined a top-eight finish with full public documentation. They are the best starting point for architecture and process, and the subsystem parts of this reference quote them throughout.

Finals counts the seasons in which the team recorded a mission score; best rank is its lowest finals position in 2022–2026 S-CENSUS.

Missouri S&T and WVU between them hold three of the five titles in the window, and their profiles are the two most complete records of a mature programme. AGH’s profile covers a champion that also races in Europe, and UIU’s covers the strongest sustained climb in the field, from thirteenth in 2022 to third in 2026.

Tier B: the twenty-four mid-field programmes

Tier B holds consistent top-20 finishers, strong single seasons and documented teams with mid-field results. Several are more useful to a first build than a champion, because they show a working rover at a realistic score level.

Finals counts the seasons in which the team recorded a mission score; best rank is its lowest finals position in 2022–2026 S-CENSUS.

Tier C: the nineteen profiles

Tier C is everything the rule does not put in A or B, including every team that never reached a finals field. Only teams with enough published material carry a profile here.

Finals counts the seasons in which the team recorded a mission score S-CENSUS. UBC Rover holds one SAR-only row, a 92.64 in 2025 S-URC25-SCORES. Alberta and UW Robotics are registered teams with no score-sheet row; they are profiled because they publish design material.

The two registered programmes sit outside the census entirely. Both are Canadian university clubs that registered across the window without reaching the field, and both publish enough about their rovers to be worth a study. Their profiles carry no results table, and say so.

The nineteen census teams without a profile

Nineteen census teams have none. The public record for most of them is a single score-sheet line and a club website, with no design report, paper or code archive behind it, so a profile would be a page of general description rather than evidence.

Eighteen of the nineteen hold at most one finals appearance, thirteen hold exactly one, and five never recorded a mission score at all. The census page lists all nineteen with their seasons and what is public about each S-CENSUS.

Reading a profile

The results table at the top is the part worth reading first: it gives the team’s score level, its consistency and the missions where it collapses. A mission profile with one strong year and four weak ones describes a different programme from one with five steady mid-field years, even when the mean total is identical.

Two habits help a comparison. The rover name and year belong before the subsystem text, because a team that builds a new rover every season has different lessons from one that develops a single platform. And the uncertainties section is part of the evidence: a team that publishes architecture but not mass, or video but not measurements, says as much about the state of the field as its score does.

Where to go next

• The 68-team census carries the full team list and the tiering rule.
• Team browser filters the same records into cards.
• The URC landscape reads the tiers as strategy.
• Results explorer, 2022–2026 shows the per-mission scores behind every results table.
• Team dossier index collects the profiles in one generated table.