For the Autonomous Navigation Mission, our rover must be able to traverse to different waypoints without any human assistance. Our rover must programmatically travel between different waypoints and, once it arrives, search for a marker. Once it reaches the marker it must signal that it is within 3 meters of a marker. Finally, it must be able to traverse through gates denoted by similarly marked posts.

At last summer’s URC competition, we ran into issues with our GPS, IMU, and drive system while attempting the Autonomous Navigation Mission. In order to fix that, this year we have decided to completely update our drive system to ensure we don’t get stuck on any boulders this year.

If you would like to see all the requirements on this challenge, please check out URC’s Requirements & Guidelines document (https://urc.marssociety.org/home/requirements-guidelines)