Carleton engineering students are off to an international competition this weekend, with a robot design they hope will make it all the way to Mars.
This is the final testing phase for Carleton’s Planetary Robotics team as they are only Canadian entry in the UK University Rover Challenge, taking place in Mancester, England.
They have worked for two years to create a robot to withstand the harsh conditions a rover would face on mars.
“It’s basically a mock Mars mission” says Kelsey Doerksen, a member of the Carleton Planetary Robotics Team, “so we’ll be in a command tent and then we’re controlling the Mars rover without actually looking at it. It has to do different tasks such as traverse over different obstacles and collect science data.”
There are 30 members of the robotics team and if they win, there's a cash prize that the team will use to finance more rovers in the future.
