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European Rover Challenge"", "ERC" – the biggest space – robotics event in Europe, dedicated to the scientific and business world, the new technology industry and the wide audience. Since 2014 ERC is organized each year in Poland at the initiative of the Polish branch of The Mars Society.
Contents
The main core of ERC is international Mars rovers competition, destinated for students and recent graduates of higher education from all around the world. European Rover Challenge as well as University Rover Challenge (the American equivalent of this competition) is a part of Rover Challenge Series – the most prestigious robotics challenge league, powered by The Mars Society.
The aim of the European Rover Challenge is to encourage students of technical universities to develop their potential through participation in the prestigious competition. The ERC also performs a kind of mission: the promotion of talented engineers. Taking up the challenge of building the rover destined for Mars exploration which meets certain conditions specified in the rules of the competition and presenting the model in front of jury of experts in robotics, planetary geology, communication and cosmonautics is for young scientists a unique opportunity to develop their career.
According to the ERC rules there are a few tasks to complete by rover teams during the competition:
- A science task involving obtaining and analyzing samples
- A “blind” navigation task, in which the team will have to guide the rover to a certain destination using just GPS coordinates and no camera input
- Two engineering tasks that will require using and repairing equipment
- Presentation of the project in front of jury
During all of the tasks, the teams will have to control their rovers without seeing them directly.
The ERC target audience
European Rover Challenge is an event aimed not only for the Mars rovers builders participating in the competition. Adding to the program some extra points, such as the science – technology conference, science presentations, expert’s lectures and meetings with special guests resulted in the interest of a very large and diverse target group. In 2014 in ERC took part 25 000 people, in the next edition - ERC 2015 - 30 000.
The ERC history
European Rover Challenge is organized since 2014. Both organized editions (2014 and 2015) of the event have been held in Świętokrzyskie voivodeship, in the Regional Science–Technology Centre. In order to properly adapt the landscape to the character of the competition, each time to the place were transported over 750 tons of the red soil imitating the Red Planet cover. Since 2016 ERC is held in Congress and Exhibition Center in Podkarpackie voivodeship, Poland
Each year in the event take part special guests. In previous editions of ERC they were among others: dr Harrison Schmitt – Apollo 17 crew, prof. Scott Hubbard, ex. Head of NASA Ames, dr Robert Zubrin, The Mars Society Founder and dr Gianfranco Visentin, Head of Automation and Robotics Section, European Space Agency. During ERC 2015 has been organized also a unique videomeeting with Andy Weir, an American novelist, author of The Martian.
The Winners of European Rover Challenge
5–7 September 2014 - first edition - ERC 2014 Number of competing teams: 9 (e.g. from India, Colombia, Egypt, Poland)
4–6 September 2015 - the second edition - ERC 2015 Number of competing teams: 29 (e.g. from US, Australia, India, Colombia, Netherlands, Egypt, Poland and Canada)