MAVRIC (Iowa State University)

MAVRIC’s record is the clearest case of participation attrition in this collection of dossiers. It registered for four of the five seasons between 2022 and 2026 and reached the finals in two of them: 19^th in 2022, then 11^th in 2024 with every mission scoring, including 42 in autonomy. In 2023, 2025 and 2026 there is a registration and no result. When the rover appears it is mid-field or better; the problem is that it does not reliably appear, and the public record has been frozen since the autumn of 2022.

Identity and results

Two earlier seasons sit outside the comparable set. In 2015 the rover scored 64 points on presentation alone, 22^nd of 23, with every task near zero. In 2016 it scored 174 and placed 11^th in the Phobos bracket of a two-bracket year S-URC-HISTRESULTS.

Three seasons carry a registration and no result row: 2023, 2025 and 2026 S-URC23-TEAMS S-URC23-SCORES S-URC25-TEAMS S-URC25-SCORES S-URC26-TEAMS S-URC26-SCORES. A review film exists for 2023 on a member’s own channel rather than the team’s S-MAVRIC-SAR2023.

Rover generations

Scarab, announced for 2023. The team’s site states the goal in plain words: to compete at the University Rover Challenge in Hanksville, Utah, in the summer of 2023 with a new rover called Scarab S-MAVRIC-SITE. Whether Scarab is the machine that competed in 2024 is not stated anywhere.

2024: the best result in the record. Every mission scored: Delivery 35, Equipment 31 and Autonomy 42, with Science 71 and a review score of 89.52 S-URC24-SCORES. Nothing in the public record describes the hardware that produced it.

Beyond those two points the lineage is empty. There are no generation names, no dates and no specification for any Iowa State rover.

Subsystems

The honest position is that no subsystem of this rover is documented in public. What follows is the whole of what exists.

Organisation. Three technical sub-teams: mechanical, which designs, manufactures and tests the mechanical systems; systems, which designs and installs the electrical circuitry and components; and science S-MAVRIC-SITE. Four student leads are named against those groups on a page dated to the autumn of 2022.

Mission framing. The site reproduces the four missions with short summaries written by the team rather than taken from the rules S-MAVRIC-SITE. Useful for a reader new to the competition, and no substitute for the score sheet.

Hardware. Nothing. Mass, wheel count and size, suspension, arm degrees of freedom, sample handling, radio, battery and computer are all absent from every source reached.

Code. There is no public code archive for this team. An organisation search under the team name returns nothing, and a search of public code for the university and the competition returns only unrelated coursework S-MAVRIC-GH.

The only hard evidence is the score sheet. A rover that scored 89.52 on the review and cleared every mission gate in 2024, with 35 in Delivery, 31 in Equipment and 42 in Autonomy, is a complete and functional system S-URC24-SCORES. That is a stronger statement about the hardware than any specification the team could publish, and it is all there is.

Mission performance

2015 to 2017: the floor. A presentation-only 64 points and 22^nd of 23 in 2015, then a 2017 season with a review score of 78.6 and Science 68 beside three zeros, for 31^st S-URC-HISTRESULTS. The classic early profile: a science mission and nothing mechanical.

2022: progress without autonomy. Science 57, Delivery 25 and Equipment 16, with autonomy at zero, for 19^th of 26 S-URC22-SCORES. Better than 2017 on every axis except the payload.

2023: a review and no result. A review film was made and uploaded to a member’s channel, the team was registered, and the score sheet has no row S-MAVRIC-SAR2023 S-URC23-SCORES. Whether that was a withdrawal, a travel decision or a failure to qualify is not published.

2024: the complete season. Every mission scored, and the total of 268.52 was 88 points better than the team’s previous best in the modern era S-URC24-SCORES. This is the single most important fact in the dossier: the capability in 2024 was comfortably top-half, and it was produced by a team whose public documentation stops two years earlier.

2025 and 2026: registered, absent. Registrations in both seasons, no rows in either score sheet, and no review films located on the team channel for either year S-URC25-TEAMS S-URC26-TEAMS S-MAVRIC-YT.

Lessons for a first build

• Plan for continuity, not for a good year. One excellent season between two empty ones is what a programme looks like when its institutional memory lives in a single cohort. Written procedures, a code archive and a current site are the countermeasures, and they are cheap.
• Treat a registration as a commitment with a date. Four registrations produced two finals appearances. Whatever caused the other two, the pattern is visible from outside and it costs the team the benefit of the doubt.
• Expect autonomy last, and budget it early. This team’s improvement tracks the arrival of a 42-point autonomy score in 2024. The same pattern appears across the field, and the teams that break it start autonomy work in the first semester.
• A departmental home is a trade. Being hosted inside an aerospace research group gives a stable laboratory and ties the team to one department’s student pipeline. Whether that helped or hurt here is unknown, but the trade should be chosen deliberately.
• Put the review where people can find it. A review film uploaded to a member’s channel is invisible to the next cohort. The team’s own channel is the archive.

What remains uncertain

Why 2023, 2025 and 2026 produced registrations and no results is the central question, and no public source answers it. Whether Scarab flew in 2024, and what the 2024 rover was called if not, is also unstated.

Every hardware detail is missing: mass, wheels, suspension, arm, drill, battery, radios and computer. The 2022 and 2023 review films are the only visual sources and neither has been read against this page. Team size is unknown: the site presents a snapshot from 2022 with four named leads and three sub-teams. Even the acronym is incomplete in public, because the site’s own expansion is cut off in the rendered text after “Mars Analog Vehicle for Roboti”.

Team sources

• Project page, the team’s page under the aerospace department, dated autumn 2022.
• 2022 System Acceptance Review, on the team channel.
• 2023 System Acceptance Review, on a member’s channel.