BYU Mars Rover

Meet Grant Thompson, our Software Subteam Lead, bringing invaluable experience and strategic prowess to our team. His expertise in algorithmic programming has been crucial in overcoming complex software challenges like obstacle detection and avoidance.

Grant's leadership ensures organizational focus by aligning objectives with our overarching plan, organizing workflows, and fostering collaboration. A deep trust in his team members allows him to focus on managerial tasks enabling his teammates to dedicate their focus to the rover system.

A balance of autonomous leadership, a robust standard of excellence, and his own hands-on involvement on the rover enable Grant to be an asset to the team as a whole, and the perfect person to lead the software subteam. 🚀

🔬 Exploring Martian Soil: Our rover's science module is a marvel of innovation! Equipped with a Flavin Adenine Dinucleotide (FAD) life detector and auger drill sample collection system, our rover can collect samples with precision. Using computer vision in Python, the rover analyzes green light emanated by the sample while exciting the FAD with blue light and reports a percentage of life detected. During FAD testing, temperature and moisture sensors test the drill sight for life-like conditions of the area.

Guided by expert advice from BYU professors, we target ancient water sites for sampling, maximizing our chances of discovery. Plus, our plans to replace the prototype circuit with a custom PCB and install a second cache on the rover allowing multi sample collection expand our exploration capabilities.🚀

Ethan Smith, a Computer Engineering Senior, combines his skills in computer engineering and leadership as a team lead and integral part of our software subteam. Specializing in robot perception and ROS programming, he enhances GPS localization and magnetometer heading systems to elevate the robot's spatial awareness.

Beyond technical prowess, Ethan excels as a meticulous coordinator ensuring team alignment, effective communication, and active participation. His inclusive leadership fosters a collaborative environment where every team member feels valued, contributing to collective success in robotics competitions. Ethan's dedication and standard for excellence propels our team closer and closer to success at the competition.

We thank him for his visionary leadership and example of teamwork and will never forget his invaluable contributions to our team.

We are thrilled to announce our acceptance to compete in the 2024 University Rover Challenge. Our System Acceptance Review video submitted in the beginning of March passed with flying colors. We can’t wait to go to Hanksville, Utah and bring home the gold.

We invite you to get a taste of our cutting-edge rover design by watching our submission video. We hope you enjoy and stay tuned for what’s next.

Watch here:

BYU Mars Rover - System Acceptance Review (SAR) - URC 2024 BYU Mars Rover Team's submission for the 2024 University Rover Challenge! Thank you to all of our supporters and sponsors from the BYU College of Engineering...

A husband of three years, father of his 18 month old daughter, and indispensable team member, Spencer blends his leadership and organizational skills to spearhead project management and systems integration. Through collaboration with our subteam leads, he steers team tasks, oversees the Rover's budget and weight requirements, and ensures competition readiness. Despite his primary focus on team leadership, Spencer’s technical expertise is impressive.

With a goal to be a Robotics Engineer in extreme environments, Spencer has combined education focused on robotics, mechatronics, and controls with practical experience in CAD, circuit design, Python, MATLAB, C++, and embedded programming. Aside from being one of our two general team leads, Spencer actively works on the electrical subteam in comms and antenna testing to configure the 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz modems for optimal communication with the rover.

In addition to working on the Mars Rover team, Spencer is a payload engineer with the BYU Rocketry team. With his help, they have developed a novel battery powered 3D printer capable of printing in zero gravity using “Direct Ink Write” printing. Spencer plans to go to graduate school and has applied to Brigham Young University, University of Utah, and University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana among others.

We are very grateful for Spencer’s contributions to the team, and can confidently say without his leadership, we wouldn’t be the team we are today.

We're thrilled by our rover's strides during mock competition testing! We’ve still got room for growth, but our hard work is paying off. 💪

Huge shoutout to Dr. Marc Killpack for being our faculty advisor this this year, and to Dr. David Allred for supporting the BYU Mars Rover team in every URC since its inception over a decade ago! We are so grateful for them and their tireless work on our behalf.

Here’s a sampling of our competition. Teams from all over the world congregated in Hanksville for the and brought with them a new and unique ideas for how to tackle the tasks.

Our science did a great job team collecting a soil sample with the auger in the field, then performing experiments to test for conditions conducive to life. We scored 95.65 out of 100!

In Hanksville preparing for our first task today at the URC: Extreme Delivery and Retrieval!!

We’re the URC spotlight for today!

BYU Mars Rover - System Acceptance Review Video - URC 2018 BYU Mars Rover System Acceptance Review Video for the University Rover Challenge 2018. Music: https://www.bensound.com/royalty-free-music

Testing out our skis for steep drops. Last year we took a bit of a tumble, but it won’t happen this year!

Extreme Retrieval team out for some test runs. Getting excited for next week’s competition!

We have 2 team members featured on the BYU home page!
Check it out: https://www.byu.edu/
Congrats Hannah Bonner and Jared Blanchard for being featured for your hard work!

We made BYU's front page!
Also, check out this video of the competition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waVd6-JVeGw

Back from URC 2017! We are excited to announce that we placed third this year! We loved this project and we loved working as a team, and we are sad to see it all end. Thanks to all who supported us!

Some pictures from our Capstone presentation today. Great job guys the presentation was awesome!

second place in 2015 URC