MARSBOTS
A European robotics company built to prepare Mars for what humanity sends next.
MARSBOTS develops autonomous robots for Mars and for missions to Mars. From a base in Germany we build rovers, excavation units and assembly swarms that map unknown terrain, extract water ice and regolith and turn raw ground into landing pads, power fields and habitats.
Our approach is end-to-end and starts on the robot itself: camera, lidar, radar and ground-penetrating sensor data are fused, assessed and acted upon on board. Instead of streaming raw measurements to Earth and waiting minutes for an answer, the robot decides what matters — where to drive, where to dig, when to stop — and downlinks only decision-relevant results. Perception, terrain reasoning, task planning and fleet coordination form one coherent stack that works across surface, subsurface, atmosphere, orbit and habitat.
The principle is simple: Explore. Build. Sustain.
We operate at the intersection of robotics, artificial intelligence and mission operations. Every system we build is designed to integrate with existing mission planning, ground segment and operations-centre workflows — not a rip-and-replace, but an autonomous layer that extends what a small crew on Earth can supervise.
MARSBOTS is privately developed and European by conviction. We believe that planetary infrastructure deserves independent, sovereign technology — built transparently, operated responsibly and governed by the highest safety standards.
Mars will not be settled by landing people on bare ground. It will be prepared — by machines that arrive first, work through dust storms and winters, and hand over a site that is ready to live in. We believe robotics is the precondition for human presence on another planet.
Our vision is a working robotic workforce on Mars: fleets that reason about their own surroundings, split tasks among themselves and keep building while Earth is minutes away. Terrain is mapped before anyone walks it, resources are extracted before anyone needs them, and crews arrive at infrastructure instead of an empty plain. We are building the machines for that future.
"We looked up for millennia and wondered what was out there. Now we can send machines to build it. Mars should be ready before we arrive."
Claus Linder founded MARSBOTS to turn a lifelong fascination with space into practical machines for the Martian surface. His work is driven by the conviction that exploration and engineering must advance together — and that Europe must play a leading role in both.
The project was inspired in part by the film Interstellar: a reminder that humanity's future is not bound to one planet, and that the courage to look beyond the horizon is what moves civilisation forward. That same spirit guides every line of code, every terrain model and every decision at MARSBOTS.