Flow diagram

Figure 1: Flow diagram of Cydonia, the first Mars rover built by Roboteam Twente for ERC 2026.

Cydonia is a prototype of a Mars rover inspired by NASA technologies, previous robotics innovation, and rough solutions to troubleshoot quickly certain technical challenges discovered along the way. The books, chapters, and pages in this wiki aim to describe the current system, but also transfer the collected knowledge on these technologies and on the state of our current system.

The team set as initial goals to create a modular system to facilitate integration of new features in future iterations of Cydonia. The modularity was a goal for both hardware and software. Additionally, we decided to focus on the most crucial subsystem and leave the missing subsystems for future versions of Cydonia.

The system is divided into mechanical, electrical, and software subsystems.subsystems, presented in Figure 1. The robotic arm, the drill, the drive system and the housing are mainly electrical and mechanical subsystems. The drill and the drone remained theoretical subsystems during the academic year 2025-2026 and should be developed into prototypes during the academic year 2026-2027. The power system is mainly electrical, and the Jetson, the communication, and the base station involve both electrical and software. The use of STMs allowed the project to develop faster. The robotic arm and the drill are envisioned to be interchangeable subsystems. In future iterations of Cydonia, the base developed for the robotic arm can be used for the base rotation of the drill as well.

The aim of Figure 1 is to illustrate all crucial interactions between components and subsystems. This is a relatively high-level chart, and one must visit the individual books of each subsystem to gain a proper understanding of the functionning of each subsystem. However, due to time constraints, certain subsystem were not fully developed based on the plan and, hence, may not follow the above system architecture.

The list of requirements set up by the team for Cydonia for all subsystems and all subteams can be found at this location: Requirements_ERC2026_ RTT. Due to time constraints, these requirements were not all properly verified. The few tests performed (ERC 2026) for system validation that were performed can be found at the following location: Test & Validation.