Sister competitions

Seven other competitions, five independent rover events and two run by NASA, publish engineering documents that are often deeper than a URC SAR submission. Their ranges are larger, their mass limits are looser and their radio links are shorter, so their rovers transfer badly. What transfers is method: how a requirements table is built, how a review is scored, how a mission is decomposed into scored behaviours.

The competitions at a glance

Competition facts from the official rules, handbooks and results pages of each event S-ERC26-RULES S-CIRC25-RULES S-ARCH27-RULES S-IRC26-RULES S-ARC26-MANUAL S-HERC26-HANDBOOK S-LUNA-SITE S-LUNA26-NEWS S-URC27-RULES.

The envelope, which is why a sister rover is not a URC rover

Envelope values from the rulebooks, requirement sheets and handbooks of each event S-ERC26-REQ S-CIRC25-RULES S-ARCH27-RULES S-IRC26-RULES S-ARC26-MANUAL S-HERC26-HANDBOOK S-URC27-RULES.

URC holds the tightest combination of mass and stowed volume in this set, and it asks for an order of magnitude more radio range than ERC or CIRC. A rover designed to win ERC is likely to weigh 25 kg more than URC allows and to carry a link sized for 100 m. The HERC remote-controlled class is the only sister class lighter than a URC rover, and at 27.2 kg inside a 0.76 m cube it is a different robot entirely.

What transfers

What each team did is taken from the competition documents and the teams’ own pages S-ERC26-RULES S-CIRC25-RULES S-ARCH27-RULES S-IRC26-RULES S-ARC26-MANUAL S-CPRT-ROVERS S-MONASH-ROVERS S-SCORPIO-PROJ S-DIANA-SITE. URC’s silence on slope and step height comes from the Q&A S-URC27-QA. The strength judgement and the limits column are inferences from those sources.

The five places sister evidence misleads

1. Mass. ERC allows 75 kg, IRC 65 kg per mission and 85 kg fielded, ARCh 60 and 90, the Anatolian challenge 60 and 80, and CIRC 50 kg as a target with a 70 kg hard stop. URC’s 50 kg per configuration inside a 1.2 m cube is the tightest combination in the set. A rover copied from any of them is likely to fail the weigh-in or the cube.
2. Radio range. ERC’s 100 m and CIRC’s site links are an order of magnitude short of URC’s 1 km requirement with non-line-of-sight sections. A link that works at ERC is not evidence of anything at URC.
3. Autonomy framing. ERC rewards harder autonomy than URC asks for: no video feedback, GNSS penalised. Building to ERC’s constraint is safe but expensive, and building to URC’s is sufficient.
4. Environment. ERC’s 0 to 30 °C and night operation, CIRC’s Alberta weather and the Anatolian night mission all describe a cooler, darker duty cycle than the Utah desert in June.
5. Indicator colours. URC uses red for autonomous, blue for teleoperation and flashing green for arrival. The Anatolian challenge uses green for teleoperation, yellow for autonomous and red to disarm. One lamp is enough, but its logic must be switchable, or judges will read it backwards.

Teams that compete in both

Sister results from the official results pages and team announcements S-ERC25-RESULTS S-ERC26-SCORES S-CIRC25-RESULTS S-CIRC26-RESULTS S-ARCH25-REPORT S-ARCH26-NEWS S-ARC26-AGH S-MONASH-ARCHPAGE S-URC24-SCORES S-URC25-SCORES S-URC26-SCORES. The “what it buys” column is an inference from the two records, not a claim by any team.

The pattern in that table is consistent and sobering. The sister results and the URC results move independently: Carleton won CIRC and finished 21^st at URC, DAM Robotics won CIRC in 2025 and finished 15^th at URC, and Northeastern improved at CIRC while dropping at URC. Legendary Rover and DAM both slipped at URC in a season of sister success, and KNR is the counter-example, improving sharply at URC while its ERC placing fell. The skills that cross over are integration repetitions, operator practice and documentation discipline. The mission that does not cross over is Delivery, which has no equivalent in CIRC or the Australian challenge: 1 km, up to 60 minutes, with the second target out of radio line of sight.

Documents worth reading

These are the free, public documents with the most transferable structure.

Availability of each document was checked in October 2026 S-ERC26-REQ S-ERC26-SCORING S-ERC26-RULES S-ARCH27-RULES S-CIRC-SAFETY S-IRC26-RULES S-HERC26-HANDBOOK S-CMU-CDR.

What is not settled

• CIRC’s edition count. The site calls both 2025 and 2026 the ninth competition, so no ordinal is quoted here S-CIRC25-RULES.
• IRC’s total score. The rulebook’s scoring table is an image, so per-mission behaviour is usable and the total is not S-IRC26-RULES.
• The Anatolian challenge’s full scoreboard. It sits behind a download button, so only AGH’s first place against 19 opponents is confirmed S-ARC26-AGH.
• The HERC human-powered champion. The 2026 human-powered winner was not located; the confirmed results are UAH’s third place in that division and first place in the remote-controlled division S-HERC26-UAH.
• A URC requirement from any of this. There is none. A design decision that rests only on a sister-competition source is an option awaiting a check against the URC requirements.

Where to go next

• Rules, limits and the field carries the URC envelope these competitions are measured against.
• Where the competition is going reads the sister events as evidence about task direction.
• Monash, AGH, Carleton, KNR and Michigan carry the dual-competition records in detail.
• The field places all of this back in the URC results.