Project Marsworks, the premier competing international rover team at the University of Sheffield, is elated to celebrate a landmark partnership with IBM. 

The partnership will primarily focus on software development, with funds allocated to the construction of the Deimos 1 Rover, the team’s most ambitious autonomous vehicle to date, designed for upcoming international robotics competitions, such as the Anatolian Rover Challenge, Lunabotics UK, and the European Rover Challenge.

A core component of the partnership is the integration of IBM Granite into our software development systems. IBM’s Collection of high-performance foundation models will be used in a multitude of ways, such as cleaning unnecessary code and optimising code by making functions more efficient. This includes introducing comments into the code and integrating personal coding styles into one coherent system.

Using IBM Granite's Vision models will also allow us to scour and extract core information from research papers, to aid us in our development of pathfinding and autonomous navigation.

Our work in advanced pathfinding, autonomous navigation, obstacle avoidance, and geological analysis, coupled with key aspects of IBM Granite’s models for research and development, will give us a level of autonomy previously reserved for only the top teams and institutions around the world. In the future years, we plan to improve our hardware capabilities to accommodate AI locally on the rover.