After experience from other similar competitions, the RoverOva team decided to participate also in the University Rover Challege competition in the United States of America in 2023.

120 teams from all over the world tried to qualify for the competition in Utah, USA, but only thirty-seven made it through the rigorous registration process. Our team (one of the smallest in the competition) scored right from the start with its preliminary design documentation, which the judges judged to be the best.

The four-day competition took place in the middle of the Utah desert, with the nearest village being 15 km away. In the desert, the team completed four missions that tested its ability to control the rover remotely using cameras or to program an autonomous sequence. The students navigated the robot from a control centre that was unusually far from the mission site. Only the autonomous control failed due to an electronics glitch, while the other three tasks performed above expectations.

In the end, the sum of the points for all the tasks meant that our team came 18th out of 37 teams.