GALILEO ROBOTICS EXPLORATION

Designs the chassis and everything that moves the rover: rocker-bogie suspension, six independently driven wheels, gearboxes and grousers for traction. It sizes the loads, picks the materials and takes the machine out to the test ground, where sand, rocks and slopes decide whether the design actually holds.

Builds the robotic arm and the tools that work in place of a human hand: kinematics, actuators and interchangeable end-effectors for gripping, driving screws and picking up samples. It owns millimetre precision and the visual feedback an operator steers the arm with from tens of metres away.

Keeps everything else alive: batteries, a protected and monitored power bus, distribution boards and wiring designed and tested by the team. It also owns the sensors, the telemetry and the radio link to the control station, the one thread that stays taut between the rover and the people driving it.

Writes the stack that turns a command into motion: motor control, teleoperation and the control station interface. In the autonomous task the rover is on its own, so this is also where visual odometry, real-time mapping, marker recognition and path planning come from.

Prepares the science side of the mission: it studies the site, decides where and how to take samples and which instruments to analyse them with. It turns field data into a reasoned answer to the judges' geological questions, which is exactly what the science task scores.

Looks for the traces that would say an environment was once habitable: sampling protocols, analysis instruments and anti-contamination procedures, because a mishandled sample proves nothing any more. It works on the same sample as geology, with a different question.

Holds the mission up outside the lab: sponsors and budget, relations with the University and with suppliers, travel logistics, communication and social. This is the division that gets the rover to the competition, and the team with it.