ITU Rover Team (Istanbul Technical University)

ITU has three finals and three different failure patterns. In 2023 the arm and autonomy were absent; in 2024 the arm arrived and Equipment Servicing reached 63; in 2025 autonomy scored for the first time. Through all three seasons the Delivery mission never exceeded 12 out of 100. That single number is the clearest case in this record of one mission family capping an otherwise improving programme.

Identity and results

The ITU Rover Team represents Istanbul Technical University in Maslak and works across seven subteams, one of which has been a drone team since at least 2023 S-ITU-SITE S-URC23-TEAMS. It appears on the URC team lists from 2022 to 2025, recorded a qualified review but no finals result in 2022, and scored finals in 2023, 2024 and 2025 S-URC22-SCORES S-URC23-SCORES S-URC24-SCORES S-URC25-SCORES. The team announced on 2026-05-15 that it had passed the 2026 System Acceptance Review and been invited to the finals, but the 2026 score sheet carries no ITU row S-ITU-SITE S-URC26-SCORES. Tier C is the census label for the three scored finals; the tier rule is defined on the census page.

No rover name is published. The team labels its machines by year: the 2023 vehicle, the 2024 vehicle, the 2025 vehicle and the 2026 rover S-ITU-SITE.

The 2022 season produced a review score of 89.96 and no mission scores. The review score is the most stable number in the record: 89.96, 88.87, 88.59 and 87.73, a spread of 2.2 points over four years S-URC22-SCORES S-URC25-SCORES.

The rover and its subsystems

The team site is an application that renders a competition record and a news feed rather than a specification sheet. Most of the technical detail comes from the 2026 review film and the public code projects.

Mobility. A chassis built from T-slot aluminium extrusion on a rocker with a differential bar, on TPU wheels with brushed DC drive motors. Film frames put the rover inside a 1.1 m cube, which is a frame-level estimate rather than a published dimension S-ITU-2026-SAR. A drone subteam is a standing part of the programme, with a public 2026 flight-simulation project S-ITU-GH.

Arm and end-effectors. The public record names an arm simulation workspace, a gripper driver that runs on a Raspberry Pi to drive the gripper and calibrate its motor controller, and Moteus brushless drives over FDCAN on an STM32G491 microcontroller, plus a separate project for measuring encoder angles S-ITU-GH. Arm degrees of freedom, reach and payload are not published. The scored evidence is Equipment Servicing at 0, 63 and 28.

Science. The 2026 news describes a modular life-detection laboratory presented with the rover at Maslak on 2026-02-10 S-ITU-SITE. Science is the rising number: 57.42, 86 and 93, the best single mission score the team has recorded. No instrument, assay or sample depth is published.

Delivery. No source describes a capture or carry mechanism, and no delivery-specific code project is public. The mission returned 10, 10 and 12.

Software. ROS 2 is the stated stack, with a navigation workshop completed by the software team on 2026-01-18 and a 2026 general software project S-ITU-SITE S-ITU-GH. The organisation holds 30 public projects active through September 2026, including embedded C for STM32, an IMU and barometer driver, a drivetrain project and a navigation package S-ITU-GH.

Mission performance

2022, review only. A review score of 89.96 with no finals result S-URC22-SCORES.

2023, 25^th of 31. Science 57.42 was the only mission above 12, and servicing and autonomy were both zero S-URC23-SCORES. A rover that could drive and run science but could not manipulate or navigate.

2024, 15^th of 34. The arm worked. Equipment Servicing jumped from 0 to 63, science rose to 86, delivery stayed at 10 and autonomy stayed at 0 S-URC24-SCORES. The profile of a team that fixes one subsystem per season.

2025, 22^nd of 35. Science rose to 93 and autonomy scored for the first time at 14, but Equipment Servicing fell from 63 to 28 and delivery stayed at 12 S-URC25-SCORES. A net loss of 13 points and seven places while the field improved.

2026, qualified but unscored. The team published its invitation on 2026-05-15 and the score sheet has no row for it S-ITU-SITE S-URC26-SCORES. Whether the team travelled and failed to record a mission score, or withdrew after the review, is not stated.

Lessons for a first build

• Build the delivery mission in the first season. A delivery score near 10 a year leaves 90 of the 100 available points in that mission unclaimed every season. In 2024 the team finished 15^th on 247.59 while fifth place scored 304.25 S-URC24-SCORES, so a competent delivery mechanism was worth more than any other single change.
• Autonomy is the second fixed cost. Zero, zero and 14 across three seasons, with the ROS 2 work documented only from 2026 S-ITU-GH. A first build should put a simple waypoint traversal on the plan early, before the stack becomes sophisticated.
• A published code archive is a transferable asset. Arm simulation, a Raspberry Pi gripper driver and FDCAN joint controllers is a coherent, cheap architecture that another team can adopt directly.
• Improving one subsystem per season is not a strategy on its own. Servicing 0 to 63 to 28 and science 57 to 86 to 93 in the same window shows a team whose integration bandwidth, not its ideas, is the constraint.
• A high review score is a floor. Five years of review scores between 87.7 and 90.0 produced one 15^th place and two finishes outside the top twenty.

What remains uncertain

Why no 2026 finals row exists after a published invitation is unknown. The delivery mechanism and its history have never been described. Rover mass and dimensions are unpublished; the only size figure is the frame-level 1.1 m cube estimate. Why Equipment Servicing lost 35 points between 2024 and 2025 while the arm projects stayed active is not explained. Radios, bands, antennas, battery chemistry and the on-board computer model are all unpublished, and the licences on the public code were not checked.

Team sources

• rover.itu.edu.tr, the team site, with the competition record and the news feed.
• itu-rover on GitHub, 30 public projects active to 2026-09-23.
• 2026 System Acceptance Review film, the rover walkthrough and the subsystem chapters.
• University Rover Challenge, the competition whose official score sheets carry the results above.