UMD’s Newest Mars Rover Is Out of This World

UMD Loop hopes to celebrate its 10th anniversary with a podium finish in an international rover competition.

When Adrian Cires saw his Mars rover lift its robotic arm for the first time, he did the unthinkable. He raced to the robot, leaned forward and planted his lips on its metal beams. 

“I literally kissed it,” said Cires, a senior University of Maryland computer science major and president of UMD Loop. “Oh my god—I just got so excited.”

For the third straight year, the student-led UMD Loop team is vying to compete in the University Rover Competition (URC)—a tournament organized by the Mars Society that challenges teams to build cutting-edge Mars rovers capable of completing missions such as autonomous navigation and detecting signatures of life. 

For Cires and his 55-person team, this is a passion project—though, for most, it’s the kind of obsession that inspires early mornings and late nights rather than locking lips. Most days, while groggy undergraduates trudge to 8 a.m. classes, Cires troubleshoots the rover’s computer code in the lab, dedicating about 70 hours per week to the team. When does he do his classwork?

“Whenever I have free time in between,” he said, laughing. 

Now celebrating its 10th anniversary, UMD Loop is entering its busiest time of year. Last week, the team submitted a video demonstration of its latest rover to the URC judges. They’re hoping for a top-36 score, which would qualify them to compete with other finalists this May in the deserts of southern Utah. Last year, the team just barely missed the cut after their rover experienced unexpected malfunctions in the waning hours before the deadline. 

“I know everyone was really crushed by that,” said Dana Wadsley, a junior chemistry major who works on the rover’s science arm. 

But both Wadsley and Cires are bullish about their odds this time around.

“For the first time, we’re reaching a point where this rover is genuinely ready for competition,” Cires said. “I fully expect to make it into the competition this year.”

College Park’s WALL-E

The UMD rover, which resides on campus in the E.A. Fernandez IDEA Factory, looks like a distant cousin to Disney and Pixar’s WALL-E. Roughly the size of a children’s toy car, its aluminum case rests on four sets of wheels and houses complex electronics. A scientific tool designed for soil sampling extends toward the ground, and a robotic arm points toward the sky. 

Remnants of the robot’s predecessors from the past two URC events lie haphazardly on the ground around the corner, their empty chassis pockmarked with dings, scratches and drill holes. 

“They’re like cars,” Cires said. “Looking at the old versions, I keep thinking that they look so bad compared to the newest model.” 

Cires pointed to cutting-edge technologies that they introduced for this year’s rover, which the team has been developing since last June. One notable addition is autonomous keyboard typing. This capability is mission-critical for any robot conducting science and penning missives on the red planet. It’s also surprisingly complex. Cires learned the algorithms required to implement it in a computer vision class he took for his computer science degree. 

This year’s robot also includes a custom-built fluorometer and Raman spectrometer to detect signs of life. Wadsley explained that the fluorometer detects chlorophyll from plants or cyanobacteria, while the Raman spectrometer detects molecular features such as carbon-carbon double bonds, carbon-carbon triple bonds and carbon-oxygen double bonds—the chemical bonds likely formed by life.

“My chemistry knowledge has really helped me on the team,” she said. “I’ve worked with a lot of chemical instruments, so I have a good sense of how they work compared to my friends on the team—especially in past years when the science team was smaller. I'm also a little bit better equipped to interpret some of the readouts.” 

For Cires and the others on the team, translating the science they’ve learned in the classroom into real-world applications is the most rewarding part of the project. 

“This team teaches you how to push the envelope—to do more than just rote memorization,” he explained. “It's the application of knowledge, and a lot of the time, it's application toward things that don't even exist yet.”

Saving a sinking ship

Fragmented and directionless just a few years ago, Cires believes UMD Loop is on the verge of a remarkable comeback.

The team was founded 10 years ago to compete in the Hyperloop pod competition. Hosted by SpaceX and the Boring Company, this tournament challenged teams to build the most efficient vehicle for a much-anticipated (and now stagnant) high-speed transportation system. UMD Loop competed in four cycles, and the team still showcases one of its pod designs in the window of its garage space in the IDEA Factory.

After the Hyperloop pod competition shuttered in 2019, the team sought a new direction. After the COVID-19 shutdown, they briefly participated in the Not-A-Boring competition in 2021, which focused on building a machine to create tunnels for transportation and utilities. They didn’t compete again until their first URC in 2024. Cires, who joined the team in 2023, said it was in a fragile state, with only 16 team members. 

“A sane person would look at this and jump ship,” Cires explained. “Maybe I was a little bit insane or something—but I just decided that I wanted to see it reach its potential.”

So, he devoted countless hours to recruiting the best teammates he could find from around campus to bring the team to its former glory—and it’s paying dividends.

A new hope

Now in its third year in URC, UMD Loop has more students interested in joining than it has open spots. Some 100 students tried out for the team in the fall. The audition process, known as “Challenge Week,” involves two weeks of team-based technical trials. It’s a test for devotion as much as it is engineering acumen. 

“Once you get into two weeks, the only people left are people who really want to join,” Cires explained. “We can teach you all the skills, but we can’t teach you enthusiasm.” 

Ultimately, the team assembled a diverse squad from across campus. About 30% of this year’s team members are majoring in computer science, 30% in mechanical or aerospace engineering, and 30% in electrical or computer engineering. The remainder come from across the university: chemistry, geology, mathematics, biology and others. Cires’ search for passionate students seems to have worked, too—perhaps best depicted, Wadsley recalled, by the many team members who dressed up as aliens last Halloween. 

To celebrate UMD Loop’s 10th anniversary, Cires is convening former team members for an alumni event this April. He’s met with past leaders—including flying to California to meet with the team's co-founder, Neel Patel, who now works as a Systems Engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, supporting the Curiosity and Perseverance Mars Rovers and the NISAR projects. 

By the time the anniversary celebration rolls around, Cires expects to have good reason to celebrate. In March, the team will find out if they qualified to compete in Utah. Cires is optimistic that they’ll make the cut. He insists he’s not Pollyannaish: The rover is in great shape, and the team is ahead of schedule. 

“This is the best team ever. The rover has skyrocketed,” Cires said. “We're not just gunning for getting into the competition—we're aiming for a podium finish.”