Hi Inventors,

First of all, I am very happy to announce that today we reached 500 members, in just over 5 months!

A cool fact about the day GTA Robotics meetup was created (I found about this recently):

    April 20, 2016 is 15 years and 1 day after one of the greatest Canadian robotics contributions in space, CanadaArm2 was launched:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadarm2

Our 500th member is: Eoghan Bergin

Congratulations Eoghan!, at our next meeting you will receive the first GTA Robotics Milestone Prize, a fully functional and modular car robot I designed and build a few months ago for education, which currently is also our GTA Robotics logo:

Thanks to Paul (a GTA Robotics member) and Namir from DME team, we will have our next meetup at:

    Ryerson Library's Digital Media Experience Lab
    https://library.ryerson.ca/dmelab/

I'll schedule the event shortly, you will see the details there.

Here is some info about the topics we will discuss and present, if you have experience in these competitions, please come and talk/present about your experience and even showcase some robots build for them:

University Rover Challenge

        http://urc.marssociety.org/

The Challenge:

Design and build the next generation of Mars rovers that will one day work alongside human explorers in the field.

The Prize:

Cash prizes, a trip to present at the annual International Mars Society Convention, and a year’s worth of bragging rights.

2017 University Rover Challenge:

June 1-3, 2017

Mars Desert Research Station

Hanksville, Utah,  United States

The Journey of the University Rover Challenge
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CWQlNNEotA

The winners from 2016 competition:

http://marsrover.mst.edu/
https://www.youtube.com/user/missourimrdt

The Missouri S&T Mars Rover Design Team (MRDT) was established in 2012 to compete in the University Rover Challenge (URC) hosted by The Mars Society. URC expects rovers to perform a number of tasks in the southern Utah desert in conditions analogous to those that would be expected in and around colonies on Mars. In two short years we have become the leading Mars rover design team in the U.S., and second in the world. This feat would not be possible without Missouri S&T, the generosity of our sponsors, and the dedication of our members.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItXjkvBWJzY

Mars Rover Test Drive
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujk0UKEPb8Q

Drives Mars Rover Robots, Continuum and Mawson, at The Mars Lab, Powerhouse Museum
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_VqzxbacGw