NASA Lunabotics Competition
UIC’s Lunabotics team captured two awards during the recent NASA 2024 Lunabotics Challenge held at The Astronauts Memorial Foundation’s Center for Space Education at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida.
The team competed against more than 40 schools in the qualifying round to advance them to the next competition of only 10 teams. During that final round, UIC won the Persistence Award — “Failure is Not an Option” and the Innovation Technology Award. They also placed fifth in the Caterpillar Autonomy Award.
The Lunabotics team is part of the Engineering Design Team student organization, which is made up of multiple groups that take part in competitions that require a diverse set of engineering backgrounds.
The interdisciplinary team members at the competition were students Colton Diederich, Gregg Angelo Escalon, Luca Russo, Catherine Schuch, Nimai Kamdar, Chloe Richmond, Elijah Wilkinson, Vivian Molina Sumba, Yuri Labuca, and Manh Phan.
Additional team members who contributed but did not attend the competition included Travis Martin, Catherine Sung, Zain Ali, Teegan Springer, and Adrian Velazquez.
For the competition, the UIC students designed, built, and controlled a robot to mine a lunar landscape and build a section of a berm. The team also performed public outreach, submitted systems engineering papers, and presented their work to a NASA review panel.
“It’s all reflective of real life,” Wilkinson said. “Having a lighter robot is good because shipping costs to space are expensive. Having a robot that uses less energy and less data transfer is good. They’re also looking for you to build a bigger and more accurate pile. A big part of that competition is also autonomy, and how much you’re able to do all the tasks autonomously.”