Who We Are

Legacy Robotics at UC Irvine's mission is to inspire interdisciplinary innovation and push the boundaries of student-led space exploration by designing and building UCI’s first-ever Mars Rover. Every year, we work towards competing in the internationally recognized University Rover Challenge hosted by The Mars Society at the Mars Desert Research Station in southern Utah. The competition challenges university students from all over the world to engineer rovers capable of performing tasks modelled after Mars exploration missions. 

Our Growth

We began our Mars Rover initiative in fall of 2024 with an ambitious goal: to build UC Irvine’s first-ever Mars Rover to compete in the University Rover Challenge. What started as a small group of students with an idea has quickly grown into a multidisciplinary engineering team with over 40 members. As our team has grown, we have developed a stronger organizational structure with sub teams, leadership and systems designed to streamline multi-functional integration.

......................=Our first Annual Design Review, Winter 2025.

In just two years, our growth has translated into huge technical progress. By winter of 2026, our team completed an entire rover and submitted our first Systems Acceptance Review (SAR), showing our rover’s capabilities across all major aspects of competition missions. Achieving this required mechanical, electrical, software and science teams to go beyond their initial prototypes and integrate their work into a functioning rover.

................Our first fully built rover, completed winter 2026 for
..........................our first System Acceptance Review.

Our growth has extended beyond the rover itself. We have had the opportunity to participate in outreach initiatives with local high schools and build relationships with other University Rover Challenge teams in Southern California, bringing aspiring engineers together to exchange knowledge and strengthen the rover community. As we continue to grow, we want to continue to build on our current momentum by creating more opportunities for students to gain meaningful engineering experience and represent UC Irvine at the University Rover Challenge.

Why Your Support Matters

Building a rover from the ground up requires students across engineering, science and other disciplines to turn their knowledge into a fully integrated system. Our rover is comprised of a custom chassis, suspension and steering system, a payload capable of detecting life in soil, a robotic arm designed to complete precise dexterous tasks on a lunar lander, a custom-built drone for aerial surveying, complex electrical and power systems and integrated software and communication systems that allow us to operate the rover and drone remotely. Bringing these systems to life requires significant resources.

.................Our electrical members working on the electrical box!

Funds raised through our ZotFunder will directly go to the research, prototyping, manufacturing, testing and integration efforts integral to the success of our rover and competition. It will help us purchase items such as microcontrollers, sensors, motors, electrical hardware, chemicals, lab supplies, raw materials, manufacturing tools and specialized software. Every contribution helps give UC Irvine students the opportunity to apply what they learn in class to an ambitious multidisciplinary engineering challenge.

.............................Manufacturing members hard at work!

By giving students resources to turn their ideas into real solutions, we make hands-on innovation more accessible at UC Irvine. Increasing our funds will allow us to provide these meaningful technical experiences to more students while expanding our outreach initiatives with local high schoolers, introducing younger students to robotics and STEM. We hope that we can accomplish more than just building UC Irvine’s first Mars Rover, but inspire the next generation of engineers, scientists and innovators.

Thank you for supporting our mission!


Connect With Us

Check out our website, follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn or reach out to us directly by emailing our Project Manager at xdeluna@uci.edu.