Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia

ProjectRED team in the world's top 10 student rovers

Students from Unimore's ProjectRED team win a prominent position in the European Rover Challenge in Poland: a result that strengthens Italy's reputation in the international robotics, aerospace engineering and mechatronics scene.

The ProjectRED team made up of students mostly from the Department of Science and Methods for Engineering (DISMI) of Unimore has regained third place in the European Rover Challenge (ERC) Space And Robotics Event, Remote category, after the excellent result of 2022, and enters the world top ten in the main competition, the on-site one.

The prestigious event is an international robotics and aerospace-themed competition that ended last weekend in Kielce, Poland, where teams of university students from all over the world compete with their mobile Rover prototypes for extraterrestrial exploration. The challenge is divided into two cathegories, the On Site Challenge, which takes place on a Mars Yard, a plot of land emulating the Martian soil where the rovers move around and perform a series of tasks, and the Remote Challenge, where the hardware is the same for all and the teams are called upon to program and control the rover and robotic arm in an optimal manner. In both cases, the tests to be performed are based on actual ESA and NASA missions.

Italy, out of 25 teams qualified for the On Site, is well represented by the Project Red (Unimore), DIANA (Polito) and Sapienza Technology Team (La Sapienza), while the opponents come largely from continental Europe (Poland, Germany, Switzerland) but also from the Mediterranean area (Greece, Spain, Turkey, Egypt).

During the competition on the Mars Yard, rovers from all over the world battled it out by climbing up artificial volcanoes or descending into craters according to predetermined routes (Navigation task), taking soil samples and carrying out analyses to formulate hypotheses on geomorphology (Science task) and operating a robotic arm on board the rover to simulate the maintenance of an electrical panel (Maintenance task). It is at the discretion of each team whether to run the challenges in manual mode, i.e. with a teleoperator guiding the arm and the rover, or autonomous mode, i.e. trying to get the necessary actions done autonomously using computer vision algorithms and advanced controls.

The final On Site ranking, out of more than 50 participating teams, once again saw the reigning Polish champions from the AGH University of Cracow win, followed by the Swiss from the FHNW School of Engineering, while the DISMI team from Project Red entered the world top ten in ninth place, a significant improvement on 2022.

Even better for Project Red was its third place 2022 in the Remote competition behind a Dutch and an Indian team, ahead of 'La Sapienza', which came fourth and also took the prize for the best 'Navigation Task Remote'.

The Polish Project Red expedition consisted of over twenty Unimore students mostly from the Reggio Emilia Engineering Department and Faculty Advisors Fabio Immovilli and Fabrizio Pancaldi. We are very pleased with this result, says DISMI Director Prof. Massimo Milani, which shows that the training of our students is of the highest level in the fields of mechatronics, automation and programming. I am convinced that we can improve this result even further, and we are integrating a few students from the new Master's Degree in Digital Automation Engineering to complete the technical features of our multidisciplinary team.

Categorie: International - english