ESA’s first Lunar Robotics Challenge was announced in late March, when European university students were invited to create an innovative, mobile robot capable of retrieving samples from a lunar-like crater. For he robots' test mission the rovers had to move from a ‘landing site’ to the rim of a lunar-like crater, descend to the bottom of the 15 m deep crater, locate and retrieve at least 0.1 kg of selected, visually distinctive, soil samples from the bottom of the crater and return to the ‘landing site’. When descending and climbing the rim of the crater the rover had to be capable of driving on slopes with an incline of up to 40 degrees. The Teide volcanic peak on the island of Tenerife acted as a mock-up of the Moon landscape recently, with eight European student teams tuning, testing and driving their lunar rovers in preparation for the robotics competition that took place during the dark nights of October 25 and 26.

A recent article on the event can be found here: http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEM4GKRTKMF_index_0.html