Quantum Robotics (Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey)

Quantum Robotics has produced the widest single-season swings in the modern field. It finished 10^th in 2023, fell to 31^st in 2024, recorded no finals result in 2025 and returned at 23^rd in 2026. Across five seasons its two mechanical missions, Delivery and Equipment Servicing, have never both worked at the same time. That is the whole explanation of the record, and the 2026 review film shows why: the perception and software work is visibly more advanced than the manipulation it has to support.

Identity and results

Every row reproduces the published result. The 2025 entry is a registration with a published review film but no score sheet row, so the record cannot distinguish a withdrawal from a failure to record a mission score S-URC22-SCORES S-URC23-SCORES S-URC24-SCORES S-URC25-SCORES S-URC25-TEAMS S-URC26-SCORES. No award is documented for any year, and the team has never published a rover name.

Rover generations

The public record before 2026 is almost empty. The team site no longer resolves, and the only archived version shows a Spanish-language site with team and history sections rather than specifications. A 2023 archive of the same domain is an unfilled template. The repositories under both plausible organisation names are empty S-QR-SITE S-QR-SITE-ARCHIVE S-QR-SITE-TEMPLATE S-QR-GH.

2026: the documented rover. The review film shows a four-wheel platform with a blue sheet-metal body over a silver tubular frame and blue machined or printed joint blocks. The wheels are wide ribbed rubber tyres on machined aluminium spoked rims, with no separate gearbox visible, and a silver tubular link runs to each wheel station in a rocker-style arrangement. The mast carries an antenna, a GPS puck on a circular ground plane, a red E-stop and a forward stereo or depth camera bar S-QR-SAR2026.

Subsystems

Mobility. Four wheels with ribbed rubber treads and machined aluminium rims suggest hub or direct drive, because no gearbox is visible. A tubular rocker-style link runs to each wheel station. Wheel diameter, motor model, gearbox ratio and mass are all unpublished. A maxon sponsor sticker is visible on the chassis, which is consistent with maxon drives but does not establish the motor model S-QR-SAR2026.

Software and perception. This is the strongest documented part of the rover. The film shows a ROS 2 workspace, nodes named calibration_probe and typing_coordinator, a /keyboard/emergency_stop topic and ZED 2i camera frames in the transform tree. An ArUco detection window tracks a keyboard with a live tracking state and pixel offsets S-QR-SAR2026. That is direct evidence of vision-guided keyboard typing, the most common servicing task in the competition.

Manipulation. Delivery and Equipment Servicing are the missions that require a working arm and a working end-effector, and they are the two that fail. The 2024 season took Equipment Servicing to zero while Science and the review held, which is the opposite failure to 2023. The arm itself is never described in text or shown clearly in the captured frames S-URC24-SCORES S-QR-SAR2026.

Science. Science scored 79, 45.24, 64 and 67 across four finals seasons, which is mid-field rather than a strength. The instruments and the assay method are not published S-URC22-SCORES S-URC23-SCORES S-URC24-SCORES S-URC26-SCORES.

Mission performance

The 2023 season is the template for what this team can do. Delivery 40, Equipment 40, Science 45.24 and Autonomy 56 produced 271.42 points, and no single mission carried it. The balance, not any individual score, produced 10^th place S-URC23-SCORES.

The 2024 and 2026 seasons are the opposite. In 2024 Equipment Servicing scored zero and Delivery 10, while the review and Science held at 84.08 and 64. In 2026 Delivery scored zero again and Equipment 7.89, while Autonomy recovered to 44 and Science to 67. The software improved and the manipulation did not, which is consistent with a vision pipeline that outruns the mechanism it guides S-URC24-SCORES S-URC26-SCORES.

The 2026 entry is also a multi-institution team, naming the Monterrey campus alongside two other Mexican institutions. Multi-campus teams carry coordination and travel costs that a single-campus team does not. Whether that helped or hurt here is not public S-URC26-SCORES.

Lessons for a first build

• A rover whose arm is unreliable cannot be a top team, whatever its perception stack. Quantum’s best year came when both manipulation missions worked, and its worst years came when they did not.
• Vision-guided typing with ArUco markers is cheap and worth copying. A keyboard framed by markers plus a dedicated typing routine removes a class of grasp-precision requirements.
• Score the missions that need hardware first. Science and autonomy can both be improved after the arm works; they cannot compensate for an arm that does not.
• Keep one artefact a year. No repository, no report and no rover name means nobody outside the team can see the progression, including next year’s members.
• Four wheels are a legitimate architecture. The choice reduces mass and complexity; the cost is traction and obstacle behaviour, which should be tested rather than assumed.

What remains uncertain

Why 2025 produced a registration and a published film but no finals row is not stated. Mass, wheel diameter, motor and gearbox specification, battery, radios and compute are unpublished. Whether the four-wheel platform is new in 2026 or older is not established, because the earlier review films were not captured. The instruments, the sampling method and the arm geometry are unknown. The site is dead and the archived copies carry no specifications.

Team sources

• YouTube channel, review films from 2021 to 2026.
• 2026 review film, the primary evidence for the current rover.
• 2025 review film, the season with no finals row.