The Earth Rover Challenge (ERC) took place at the 2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024), in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Figure 1). The aim of the challenge was to evaluate state-of-the-art autonomous ground navigation systems to move mobile robots through outdoor real-world environments with a set of low-cost onboard sensors [red–green–blue (RGB) cameras, inertia sensors, wheel encoders, and GPS] and offboard computation enabled by 4G communication. Specifically, the task was to navigate standardized four-wheeled differential-drive ground robots across the globe from predefined start locations to GPS goal locations. Three teams from across the world participated in the challenge. The competition results revealed insights into deploying autonomous mobile robots in the wild without expensive onboard sensors and computation as well as the engineering of the environments. In this article, we report the results and findings of the first ERC at IROS 2024, present the approaches used by three teams, and discuss lessons learned from the challenge to point out future research directions.
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