Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Congratulations to the Imperial Planetary Robotics Lab (IPRL) team – a student-led group who brought together talent from Aeronautics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering and were the only UK team to qualify at the European Rover Challenge.

Student teams from universities around the world design unique Mars rovers. After months of hard work their concepts are aessessed by space sector professionals, and qualifying finalists test their prototypes on a realistic Martian terrain in a number of demanding tasks based on real NASA and ESA missions.

In just three years, the IPRL team has grown from a small start-up of enthusiasts to a cross-department community of engineers competing against some of the best university rover teams in the world.

This blog post, written by EEE’s Ryusei Kinosaki, takes us through the students’ journey from initial one-off prototype, to this year’s modular Robot Operating System-based design.

A space for space

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

The ERC is an annual competition where university rover teams from around the world come to test their rover and engineering skills by executing various tasks set by the organisers on 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. 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.

2023 – Keeping it simple

To keep the team simple and robust, we decided on 3 core philosophies: keep the team small – which led us to a team of ~12 – 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 place in 2023, beating other well-known teams such as STAR Dresden and BEARS, from technical universities of Dresden and Berlin, respectively.

2024 – Ambitious upgrades

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 aluminium suspension system. Although the manufacturing demand delayed our production timeline, we still qualified for ERC 2024 at top 16, which would take place in Kraków, Poland to celebrate the competition’s 10th 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.

2025 – Hitches and glitches

For 2025, we decided to build a rover with 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 Robot Operating System (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 6th best team.

Watch the team’s qualifying video:

On the finals itself, although the rover this year 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 from drilling 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.

Lessons learned

Engineering always involves failures and learning lessons from them, which will be our objectives for the next year: The main subsystem that needs to be reworked would be the robotic arm, where we plan to rebuild from scratch, as well as adding autonomy to the rover’s driving.

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

Ryusei Kinosaki

As one of the BOBCat team sponsors, Professor Tim Green proudly signed a team shirt on behalf of EEE. A fitting celebration of a student group that has shown “perseverance, creativity and collaboration in abundance”.

Congratulations once again to all the students involved across EEE, Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering, some of whom have just finished their undergraduate studies this summer.

We look forward to following the next chapter of IPRL’s rover story in 2026.

Roll call – EEE students involved in IPRL 2025:

Read Driving ambition: Imperial team’s Mars journey to the European Rover Challenge in full

First year EIE undergraduate student Sourish Sharma assembled an interdisciplinary team to reach the semifinals of a national competition.

Thank you Sourish, for sharing your journey.

“I’ve always had an interest in cybersecurity and hacking, which led me to attend the BSides security conference, and at one of the stalls there, I met someone who talked about his mission to inspire the younger generation, and he encouraged me to sign up to the Cyber Leaders Challenge. So, I formed a team and we submitted our application.

For the next round, we all went to Cheltenham to compete in-person. It was a fantastic day trip, where we had to brief a mock local council of decision makers on a fictional cybersecurity incident. We had spent a few weeks preparing, but it mostly all came down to the final 48 hours!

We submitted our briefing note with one minute to spare! Despite our super shoddy presentation (my notes were all digital, but we weren’t allowed phones!), we progressed to the next round – probably because of the way we structured our response and represented information in our handout. The judges seemed impressed with our method of communication, even if our public speaking skills had some way to go.

“Teamwork, determination and passion”

The next round was much the same process. This time, it was held in BT Tower, London. Our team was very multi-disciplinary – we had an Imperial Maths student (Adi), an Imperial Mechanical Engineering student (Kuan), a Computer Engineering student (Ivan, from the University of Birmingham), and an EIE student (me). This probably helped us do so well, despite being relatively inexperienced – we were the only first-year team!

We attacked the problem from multiple points and put together a concise briefing for the mock government officials. There was lots of arguing during the quarter-finals, but ultimately we had to disagree and commit.

Fortunately, this worked out well. We somehow progressed from the quarter-finals to the semis (top 10 of 65). This time, we didn’t have a month to prepare – we just had overnight! Fuelled by lots of coffee and Red Bull, we managed to get a solid script done in time for the next day, though a couple of us were barely functioning with such little sleep.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get through to the very finals, but we did hang around to see the finals live. We took away some important lessons from the judges’ feedback and the live finals, and look forward to out-doing ourselves next year”

Mentors and memories

“Throughout, my tutor, EEE’s Dr Elina Spyrou was a fantastic mentor. She brought yet another perspective to each of the three problems, and made interesting points each time. Elina was really invested into the competition and our success, ensuring to come to the semi-finals to see our performance! She brought joy to every interaction and took us all out on a celebratory/good luck dinner the night before the finals!

We were also extremely busy during each stage. The initial application was done last-minute, and a couple of us were on holiday! The next round came after IC Hack, which was super tiring. The quarter and semi-finals were in the same week as a couple of our big course exams, orals, and coursework submissions! Juggling all of these things together was near-impossible, but simply by trying harder and putting more grit into it, we managed.

Over the competition, we met many amazing students who will remain lifelong friends. We had the opportunity to learn loads about the cyber industry, which showed me a whole new part of it that I never considered before.

The views from the top of the BT Tower, both during the day but especially at night were phenomenal and an experience we won’t forget 🙂 “

Sourish’s top take-aways from the experience

• Even first-year students are able to achieve things; there’s no need to wait 1, 2 or 3 years before entering competitions and working on projects.
• It really highlights the power of a multi-disciplinary team and meeting people outside your own course.
• There’s great value in going to industry conferences and networking with others.
• It was a great opportunity to demonstrate our passion and drive, especially given that we had lots of exams to juggle during the finals.

Read Cyber Leaders’ Challenge: the highs and lows! in full