UIC team wins first place at NASA Lunabotics competition

UIC students won first place in the Robotic Construction competition during NASA’s 2025 Lunabotics Challenge at The Astronauts Memorial Foundation’s Center for Space Education in Florida.

Lunabotics is NASA’s annual challenge at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, where students design and build an autonomous and remote-controlled robot to navigate a lunar surface in support of the ArtemisMission, a series of campaigns to return to the Moon. The Robotic Construction competition challenged teams to use their robot to excavate, transport, and deposit lunar regolith simulant, a material similar to the rock, dirt, and other materials available on the moon, to construct berms, demonstrating effective lunar surface construction techniques.

UIC’s Lunabotics team is part of the Engineering Design Team student organization. The interdisciplinary team members at the competition were biomedical engineering student Scott Morabito; electrical and computer engineering students Colton Diederich, team co-captain Catherine Schuch, Aiden Smith, Samin Sohrabi, and Adrian Tse; liberal arts and sciences student Aakash Bajaj; and mechanical and industrial engineering students Charles Brailovsky, George Ciuca, Davin Doan, Nimai Kamdar, Fernanda Palomar, and team co-captain Elijah Wilkinson. MIE Assistant Professor Pranav Bhounsule accompanied the team as its faculty advisor.

The challenge began with UIC competing against 36 schools in a qualifying round at the University of Central Florida. UIC came out on top, advancing to the final round of 10 teams at NASA, where they prevailed in harvesting the lunar regolith.

“We had the best robot and performed the best,” Wilkinson said. “It’s a significant award, and we’re all thrilled.”

“It’s very gratifying. The team spent a lot of time working on this robot and seeing it all pay off and celebrating with the people I’ve worked with all year was an amazing experience,” Schuch added.

One of the keys to winning was taking risks and pushing the limits of the robot early in the process while they were testing it at the UIC MakerSpace.

“Test early, test hard, and break it to understand where it breaks,” Wilkinson said. “We were testing two months before the competition, and the first time we tested, I said, ‘Put everything to 100% output because that’s how we’re driving in the competition. If we’re going to break something, we need to break it as soon as possible so we can start designing a solution.’ And we did break things in that testing process.”

The team also attributed their win to working well together to create a positive atmosphere where everyone worked hard to get to the podium.

“There are a lot of really dedicated people, and we had a good synergy,” Wilkinson said. “When we were at NASA, everybody worked together and remained focused on the competition.”

“We got closer as the year continued. There were some moments of tension when we had disagreements, but they were always handled very professionally. I think having these disagreements made the bond between us very strong because we were all very committed to this project,” Schuch said.

The students also learned from one another and how to work on an interdisciplinary team.

“Being interdisciplinary is one of the coolest things about our club and one of the strongest things about it, too. It’s important for going into industry to have this experience with other people. You have to know how to work with programmers and electrical engineers and understand how to design and interact with those systems,” Wilkinson said.

Schuch added engineers aren’t able to have a specialty in every single field, so they need to learn to collaborate with other disciplines to be successful in their careers.

UIC also received the Innovation Award for the second year in a row. The recognition is given to teams for their original ideas, creating efficiency, effective results, and problem solving. A big part of the student design incorporates a giant industrial vibrator similar to what is used on the back of Chicago snowplow trucks with big salt containers. The vibrator shakes the salt, so it doesn’t clog up. The same concept is used to prevent the regolith from clogging up. The UIC students improved on this idea to capture the judges’ attention.

“They like our design, which is very unique and something they’re interested in actually applying,” Wilkinson said.

While Wilkinson and other members have graduated and moved on to working in industry, many returning members are already planning for next year’s competition.

“We spoke with the other top 10 teams and got to see their designs. While our design won first place, other teams are starting to catch up. It’s very important that we continue to improve our design. No matter how good we think our design is, it could always be improved,” Schuch said. “We’re looking to improve the robot and see if we can win first place in the overall competition next year.”