Yonder Dynamics (UC San Diego)

Yonder reached fifth in 2023 on an autonomy score of 92, the second-best in a 31-team field. It had reached eighth the year before on a Science score of 100. Those are two different strengths in two different years. Since 2023 the team has declined every season, to 19^th and then 24^th, with Equipment Servicing falling from 68 to 14 to 6.32 and autonomy from 92 to 28 to 12. The public record cannot explain the fall, because the code stops in 2019 and the team site carries rover names and ranks rather than engineering.

Identity and results

The 2017 and 2018 rows come from the archived official tables; the modern rows come from the five score sheets S-URC-HISTRESULTS S-URC22-SCORES S-URC26-SCORES.

The 2019 season, named Apathy by the team, produced no finals table entry. The 2022 to 2026 rows reproduce the published results S-URC26-SCORES. No award is documented in the score sheets or on the team site.

There is one disagreement worth recording. The team’s own rover page lists 2022 as 13^th of 99, while the official 2022 sheet places it eighth of 26 finalists. A 99-team field is a registered-team count rather than a finals count, so the two numbers are measuring different populations. The official rank is the one used here S-YONDER-ROVERS S-URC22-SCORES.

Rover generations

Courage and Procyon, 2017 and 2018. Both rovers scored in Science and nowhere else, with three zeros in 2017 and two in 2018. Procyon’s 86.96 in Science is the first sign of the payload strength that later produced a perfect score S-URC-HISTRESULTS.

Apathy, 2019. The team labels this season with the pandemic and no finals row exists.

Complacency, 2022. Science scored 100, autonomy 42 and Delivery 25. A science-first rover that finished eighth S-URC22-SCORES.

Lethargy, 2023. The best rover in the record: autonomy 92, Equipment Servicing 49 and Science 85.26, with Delivery at 15. Two of four missions were excellent and the result was fifth S-URC23-SCORES.

Latency, 2024. The most balanced season: Equipment Servicing 68, autonomy 56, Science 65 and the review at 93.75. It produced a worse rank than 2023 because the field improved around it S-URC24-SCORES.

Contingency, 2025. Equipment Servicing fell from 68 to 14 and autonomy from 56 to 28, while Science held at 89 and Delivery reached its all-time high of 30 S-URC25-SCORES.

The 2026 rover. No name has been published, and the team’s rover page stops at 2025. The 2026 scores are the only description: Equipment Servicing 6.32, autonomy 12, Delivery 20 and Science 69 S-URC26-SCORES S-YONDER-ROVERS.

Subsystems

Mobility and manipulation. Nothing is published for any modern rover. No wheel count, arm geometry, end-effector or actuator family appears in a source reached. The mission scores are the only evidence that the arm exists, and they say it worked in 2024 and stopped working in 2026 S-URC24-SCORES S-URC26-SCORES.

Science. Science is the one subsystem with a sustained record: 75, 86.96, 100, 85.26, 65, 89 and 69. A perfect score in 2022 is not luck, and the payload remained above the field median in 2026. The instruments, the sampling depth and the assay are not published S-URC22-SCORES S-URC26-SCORES.

Autonomy. The score sequence is 0, 0, 42, 92, 56, 28 and 12. The 92 is the high-water mark and the following years are a monotone decay. A number that cannot be explained by any published design is also a number that cannot be defended, which is the risk of treating autonomy as a black box S-URC-HISTRESULTS S-URC26-SCORES.

Software, as it was in 2018. The public organisation holds 36 repositories, and the latest push across the whole organisation is February 2019. What survives is a ROS 1 and Redis multi-service architecture: a mapping service that turns depth-camera input into an octomap and exports a 2D map, a path follower, a state machine, a science service that controls soil sampling, motor-control packages and an operator control panel interface. It is good evidence of how a mid-2010s team structured a stack and no evidence at all about the 2022 to 2026 rovers S-YONDER-GH.

Mission performance

The modern record has three periods. 2017 and 2018 are science-only rovers. 2022 to 2024 are the strong years, with an eighth, a fifth and a sixth, and the two years in the middle are the only ones in which autonomy and Equipment Servicing both worked S-URC22-SCORES S-URC24-SCORES.

The 2025 and 2026 seasons are a collapse concentrated in two subsystems. Equipment Servicing fell from 68 to 14 to 6.32, and autonomy from 56 to 28 to 12, while Science stayed respectable and Delivery stayed near its ceiling. The record cannot say whether the cause was team composition, an ageing platform or a decision to deprioritise the competition, because there is no statement, no report and no code after 2019 S-URC25-SCORES S-URC26-SCORES.

The comparison with the strongest programmes is direct. Missouri S&T and WVU have held their scores with inherited code, reports and assumptions. Yonder’s decay is what a team looks like when the knowledge lives only in the members who graduate.

Lessons for a first build

• Undocumented autonomy is a temporary asset. A score of 92 that nobody outside the team can explain is one graduation away from zero, and there is no way to rebuild it from the record.
• Annual rebuilds are visible in the naming. Courage, Procyon, Apathy, Complacency, Lethargy, Latency and Contingency is a new rover every season, which resets tuning and spares.
• A single strong mission cannot carry a rover whose other missions are zero. The 2017 and 2018 seasons prove it, and the 2026 season is the same lesson with better science.
• Fix Delivery once. Five seasons between 15 and 30 is a persistent design gap, not bad luck.
• Read the old repository as history. The 2018 stack is a useful picture of a mid-2010s architecture, not a starting point for a 2027 rover.

What remains uncertain

The 2022 rank disagreement between the team page and the official sheet remains open, and any statistic that depends on field size inherits it. Why Equipment Servicing fell from 68 to 6.32 and autonomy from 92 to 12 has no public explanation. The 2026 rover has no name and no design description. Mass, wheels, arm, instruments, radio and compute are unknown for every modern rover. Team size and continuity are unknown.

Team sources

• yonderdynamics.org, the team site, rendered in a browser.
• Rovers page, the rover lineage and the team’s own rank claims.
• Yonder-Dynamics on GitHub, the 2017 to 2019 code archive.
• 2024 review film, the most recent film with a published link.
• YouTube channel, review films from 2019 to 2026.