- March 04, 2026
- By Jason P. Dinh
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 just got so excited,” said Cires ’26, a University of Maryland computer science major and president of an ambitious student engineering team, UMD Loop.
For the third straight year, UMD Loop 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 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; he dedicates about 70 hours per week to the team.
UMD Loop just last week submitted a video demonstration of its latest rover to the URC judges. The team hopes for a top-36 score, which would qualify it for the finals this May in the deserts of southern Utah. Last year, the team barely missed the cut after its rover malfunctioned in the waning hours before the deadline.
Cires is bullish about the team’s odds this time around.
“For the first time, we’re reaching a point where this rover is genuinely ready for competition,” Cires said.
That would mark a comeback for the team, started in 2015 and chartered as UMD Loop in 2016 to join the international Hyperloop pod competition hosted by SpaceX and the Boring Company. The tournament challenged teams to build the most efficient vehicle for a much-anticipated (and now stagnated) high-speed transportation system. UMD Loop competed in four cycles before the competition shuttered in 2019. After the COVID-19 shutdown, the team briefly participated in the Not-A-Boring competition in 2021, which focused on building a machine to create tunnels for transportation and utilities. It didn’t compete again until its 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,” he said. “Maybe I was a little bit insane or something—but I just decided that I wanted to see it reach its potential.”
The UMD rover, which resides in the E.A. Fernandez IDEA Factory, looks like a distant cousin to Disney-Pixar’s WALL-E. Roughly the size of a children’s Little Tikes car, its aluminum case rests on four wheels and houses complex electronics. A scientific tool designed for soil sampling extends toward the ground, and a robotic arm points skyward.
The team introduced cutting-edge technologies for this year’s rover, such as autonomous keyboard typing—mission-critical for any robot conducting science and penning missives on the red planet—and a custom-built fluorometer and Raman spectrometer to detect signs of life.
Dana Wadsley ’27, a chemistry major who works on the rover’s science arm, explained that the fluorometer detects chlorophyll from plants or cyanobacteria, while the Raman spectrometer detects chemical bonds likely formed by life.
“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,” she said.
Translating the science they’ve learned in the classroom into real-world applications is the most rewarding part of the project, Cires said.
“This team teaches you how to push the envelope—to do more than just rote memorization,” he said. “It's the application of knowledge, and a lot of the time, it's application toward things that don't even exist yet.”
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 said. “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 a range of STEM fields.
To celebrate UMD Loop’s 10th anniversary, Cires is convening former team members for an alumni event this April. He expects to have good reason to celebrate. In March, the team will find out if it qualified to compete in Utah.
“This is the best team ever. The rover has skyrocketed,” he said. “We're not just gunning for getting into the competition—we're aiming for a podium finish.”