European Rover Challenge: Excellent Result for Unimore’s Project RED Team
Unimore’s Project RED team, composed mainly of students from the Department of Sciences and Method for Engineering (DISMI), took part in the European Rover Challenge (ERC) Space and Robotics Event, an international competition focused on robotics and aerospace, achieving 14th place in the main on-site challenge.
The prestigious event, held in Kraków, Poland, brings together university student teams from across the globe each year to compete with their mobile rover prototypes designed for extraterrestrial exploration. The tasks are based on real missions from the ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA, and are divided into seven distinct challenges, ranging from autonomous navigation to soil sampling using a corer and robotic arm, through to drone operations.
Italy was represented by Project RED with the Sirio rover (Unimore), DIANA (Politecnico di Torino), and Sapienza Technology Team (La Sapienza University), while competitors mainly came from continental Europe (Poland, Germany, Switzerland), the Mediterranean region (Greece, Spain, Turkey, Egypt), and India.
On the Mars Yard test site, rovers from around the world competed by climbing artificial volcanoes and descending into craters along predefined routes (Navigation task), collecting soil samples and conducting analyses to develop geomorphological hypotheses (Science task), and operating an onboard robotic arm to simulate electrical panel maintenance (Maintenance task) or collect samples directly on the competition field, as well as controlling a drone autonomously.
In the final ranking of the on-site competition, the winning team was from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, selected from over 101 applicant teams. Italian teams achieved excellent results: Politecnico di Torino placed fourth, while Project RED from Unimore’s DISMI ranked 14th, ahead of their colleagues from La Sapienza.
Project RED’s Polish expedition, a student learning by doing initiative supported by DISMI and the Emilia-Romagna Region, was made up of around twenty Unimore students from the Department of Engineering in Reggio Emilia, accompanied by Faculty Advisors Prof. Fabrizio Pancaldi and Prof. Andrea Spaggiari.
“We are very pleased with this result,” stated Prof. Massimo Milani, Director of DISMI, “which demonstrates that our students’ training is of the highest standard in the fields of automation mechanics and programming. Mechatronics remains at the heart of many industrial systems, and here our students receive advanced training in a field with countless applications and strong demand in the labour market.”
Categorie: International - english, Notizie_eng
Articolo pubblicato da: Ufficio Stampa Unimore - ufficiostampa@unimore.it