The Imperial Planetary Robotics Lab at ERC2025 and beyond

The IPRL team tell us about their experience at European Rover Challenge (ERC) 2025 and their goals for the future.

Imperial Planetary Robotics Lab (IPRL) began as a student project group founded in 2022, with a long-term goal to create a space for passionate space and robotics enthusiasts. Their first project, which continues to this day, was to build a realistic working rover to take part in the European Rover Challenge (ERC).

The ERC is an annual competition in which university rover teams from around the world test their rover and engineering skills by executing various tasks set by the organisers on a Mars-like terrain, called the Mars Yard. Tasks include autonomous navigation, manipulation of a maintenance panel using a robotic manipulator, as well as sampling of rocks, regolith, and deep samples using the robotic manipulator and a drill subsystem. Team member Ryusei Kinosaki explains the IPRL team's process:

"Although the new rules and tasks come out around February every year, the design and manufacturing process starts at the start of each academic year to make up for the busy period during the finals and groupwork season in Imperial.

To keep the team simple and robust, we decided on three core philosophies: keep the team small, which led us to a team of about twelve, stick to requirements to avoid overengineering, and to keep testing to iterate our design. Our goal for the first year was to make the ERC finals, which would mean placing top 25 in the qualification process. We clinched top 24, which meant that we were on the way to Kielce, Poland to compete against other new and veteran teams. Although we were against many rovers with years of development and experience, our simple construction allowed us to do well in most tasks, leading to 11th placein 2023, beating other well-known teams such as STAR Dresden and BEARS, from technical universities of Dresden and Berlin, respectively.

Although the first year was quite successful, the rover itself was a one-off with little room for improvement. Hence, our team was expanded to 20 to include new subsystems and upgrade the rover: 3D printed tyres, rotatable wheels, a new drilling system, and an aluminum suspension system. Although the manufacturing demand delayed our production timeline, we still qualified for ERC 2024 at top 16, which would take place in Krakow, Poland to celebrate the competition’s tenth anniversary. However, the complex nature of the rover system delayed the electronics system’s assembly and testing, which ended our finals run with 17th place.

For 2025, we decided to build a rover with a robust driving base and overhauling of electronics to prevent the mistakes we made last year. Hence, that led to a rover with differential steering like in the first year, as well as a ROS-based software and electronics system. Each subsystem’s PCB and microcontroller is controlled by a ROS node initialised by a central computer. As the previous two years, we qualified for the finals as the sixth best team.

At the finals, although the rover seemed more ready than the previous year’s, some small hitches rendered some parts of the rover’s subsystem unusable. For example, the robotic manipulator was hard to control, which led to missing the pH probe inside the measurement site for the newly introduced astro-bio task. The drilling system’s payload servo also had an overheating problem, which prevented us to drill into the deep sampling site without piercing through the payload. Moreover, the higher latency on-site due to the unexpected interference of the venue made the execution of the task slower than one had planned during the testing on campus.

Our final standing for the ERC2025 was 16th place, which was much lower than we had hoped for, but that doesn’t mean this year wasn’t a successful year. We had still completed the goal of a robust and reliable driving system, as well as a modular electronic system, that requires only minor improvements. All of this was done with just a small budget that was a tenth or less of what other teams had available. Engineering always involves failures and learning lessons from them, which will be our objectives for the next year: a complete rework on the robotic arm, that we plan to rebuild from scratch, as well as adding autonomy to the rover’s navigation system.

Finally, we would like to express our thanks to all our supporters and sponsors: Imperial College Robotics Society, Magdrive, ACCU, Imperial College Space Society, the Department of Aeronautics, the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Our journey would not have been possible without them."