Mars Rover Manipal (Manipal Institute of Technology)

Mars Rover Manipal finished seventh, eighth and eighth in three consecutive years from 2017, when the finals field was 36 teams. In the modern era it scores well on the written review and on science, and scores zero in autonomous navigation every time. Its 2024 total of 246.28 was its second best ever and was produced with a third of the mission set missing. Nothing has been recorded since, and the team’s domain now serves a holding page with no content.

Identity and results

The three seasons before that carry totals but no mission split in the record used here: 291.9 for eighth in 2017 and 278.49 for seventh in 2018 S-URC-HISTRESULTS. Two later seasons produced a review and nothing else: 85.10 in 2023 with no finals place, and a 2025 registration with no result row S-URC23-SCORES S-URC25-TEAMS S-URC25-SCORES. The team is absent from the 2026 team list entirely S-URC26-TEAMS.

The team uses no rover generation names in any source. That is a genuine limit on comparison: there is no way to tell from the record whether the 2024 rover shares a chassis with the 2019 machine.

Rover generations

2017 to 2019: the peak. Eighth, seventh and eighth with the field at 36 teams S-URC-HISTRESULTS. The 2019 season is the only one in which every mission scored: Science 95, Equipment 49, Delivery 40 and Autonomy 8 S-URC-HISTRESULTS. Even at the peak, autonomy was the weakest mission.

2022: science alone. Science 85 and a review score of 91.86, with Delivery, Equipment Servicing and Autonomy all at zero, for 21^st of 26 S-URC22-SCORES. Only the payload worked.

2023: the review, and no finals place. 85.10 on the review, with no mission scores S-URC23-SCORES. A high review is not evidence of a bad team, and a missing finals row is not evidence of a bad rover.

2024: two missions recovered. Delivery 25 and Equipment 41, the manipulation hardware had arrived, with an excellent review at 93.28 and Science 87, and Autonomy still at zero for 18^th of 34 S-URC24-SCORES. This is the most frustrating row in the dossier: two missions fixed and one untouched.

2025 and 2026: nothing recorded. A 2025 registration with no results and no review film located, then no registration at all in 2026 S-URC25-TEAMS S-URC25-SCORES S-URC26-TEAMS.

Subsystems

The public record here is code and video. There is no specification page, no design document and no paper, and the domain serves a holding page with no content S-MRM-SITE.

Software history. A task-by-task code archive for the 2019 competition, a ROS 1 workspace alongside it, and a branch of code written for an NVIDIA Jetson TX2 in 2022 S-MRM-GH. The archive-per-competition convention is the same practice the strongest programmes in the field use, at a tenth of the scale.

The active suspension project. A closed-chain active suspension system trained with reinforcement learning in a Gazebo simulation on ROS Noetic and Gazebo 11, using a soft-actor-critic method from a standard reinforcement-learning library S-MRM-GH-ACTIVE. Very few URC teams publish anything like it. Nothing connects it to the rover that competed, and the competition record shows no sign of an active suspension reaching the field.

Operator interface. A ground control interface dated 2023 and a joystick driver dated 2021 S-MRM-GH. Both are the kind of small, unglamorous project that decides how fast a team can run a mission.

Science and sensors. A sensor-suite codebase written for the 2023 season covering both the American and Indian competitions S-MRM-GH. The instruments it drives are unpublished.

Second competition. A separate codebase for the Indian Rover Design Challenge 2023, plus two small wireless and controller projects S-MRM-GH. Like several teams in this band, the year is split between the Indian and American rover circuits.

Mobility, arm, power and communications. Nothing is published. Mass, wheel count, suspension type on the flown rover, arm degrees of freedom, battery, radios and science instruments are all absent from the record, and the review films are the only route to them.

Mission performance

The autonomy zero. Autonomy scored zero in 2022 and zero in 2024, and only 8 in 2019 at the team’s peak S-URC22-SCORES S-URC24-SCORES S-URC-HISTRESULTS. That is 100 points unclaimed in each modern finals season. The team that published a reinforcement-learning suspension project never put a working autonomous traverse on the field, which is the single largest recoverable loss in this dossier.

The fix order worked. From 2022 to 2024, Delivery and Equipment Servicing went from 0 and 0 to 25 and 41 while the review score rose slightly from 91.86 to 93.28 S-URC22-SCORES S-URC24-SCORES. Two seasons is a realistic horizon for recovering a manipulation mission. Autonomy is the one that stayed at zero for six years.

Attendance was the other constraint. 2023 ended at the review, 2025 produced a registration with no review film, and 2026 has no registration S-URC23-SCORES S-URC25-SCORES S-URC26-TEAMS. Three of the last five seasons produced no finals result, which is a programme problem rather than a rover problem.

Lessons for a first build

• Simulation research needs an owner for integration. An active suspension trained in simulation is a strong student project and not a subsystem until someone is responsible for putting it on the rover and measuring it there S-MRM-GH-ACTIVE.
• Archive the code per season. A task-by-task archive for one competition year is cheap to make and it is the only reason this team’s engineering is legible at all.
• Recover the mission that scores, in order. Delivery and Equipment were fixed in two seasons while the review held. Attempting all four at once is what produces the 2022 row.
• Schedule a full autonomous run as a gate. Six years of autonomy at or near zero is the cost of leaving it until the manipulation work is finished.
• Keep a public page alive. This team’s site is a holding page, its archives stop in 2023, and its record is now inferred from a score sheet. Documentation outlives the cohort that made it, and it is the only thing a future team can build on S-MRM-SITE S-MRM-GH.

What remains uncertain

Why autonomy scored zero in 2022 and 2024 is the central question and has no public answer. Whether the team is dormant or disbanded is also unknown: it registered in 2025, produced no review film, and is absent from the 2026 list.

Every physical specification is missing: mass, wheels, suspension on the flown rover, arm degrees of freedom, battery, radios and science instruments. Whether an archived copy of the domain holds the missing specifications is unchecked. Whether the Indian-competition work fed back into the URC rover, or ran as a parallel effort, is also unstated.

Team sources

• marsrovermanipal.com, the team domain, currently a holding page.
• Mars-Rover-Manipal on GitHub, 12 public archives.
• Active suspension archive, the Gazebo reinforcement-learning project.
• YouTube channel, reviews from 2018 to 2024.
• 2024 System Acceptance Review, the last recorded season.