UA, Shelton State students take top prize at NASA lunar robot competition (video)
View full sizeAlabama Lunabotics members, from left, Jason Watts, Adam Melton, Mitchell Spryn and Justin Baker work on their lunabot in space provided for engineering student projects. (UA photo)TUSCALOOSA, Alabama -- A team of University of Alabama and Shelton State Community College students took the top prize in a NASA lunar robot competition over the weekend.
The team, named Alabama Lunabotics, beat out more than 50 teams to earn the Joe Kosmo Award for Excellence at the third annual NASA Lunabotics Mining Competition at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Saturday.
In the weeklong competition, teams from eight countries brought remote controlled and autonomous robots designed as lunar soil excavators, or lunabots, to mine lunar-like soil and carry it through an obstacle course.
Kenneth Ricks, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UA and the team's faculty adviser, said the team from Tuscaloosa finished in the top three in four of the competition's five categories on its way to winning $8,000 and other prizes at the event.
"This competition is a very hard one to win, and I am so pleased and so proud of the team for their hard work and their hours in the lab," Ricks said. "Their robot design was very robust. They did a great job and they deserve it."
The competition has changed every year to stimulate different kinds of design, Ricks said. NASA has added design challenges including penalties for weight and remote bandwidth as well as bonus points for making robots "smart" by adding autonomy.
Ricks said he thinks the Alabama Lunabotics robot's balance -- lightweight with strong mechanical design and partially autonomous -- helped push the Alabama Lunabotics team to second place in the mining portion of the competition.
"We actually finished with probably one of the better, more balanced entries in the entire competition because of the weight and the autonomy," Ricks said. "A lot of teams were either really heavy or really light, but they had a difficult time reaching a balance between the weight of the robot and the capabilities of the robot."
The team placed first with their formal presentation and earned first place in the team spirit category for the second straight year. For the team spirit award, Alabama Lunabotics members helped participants with their designs at the competition and loaned parts, computers and expertise to other teams. The team also earned honorable mention for innovation.
The lunabotics competition addresses one of NASA's goals in space travel: creating a long-term presence on the moon by being able to mine the lunar soil for oxygen and hydrogen.
"The first major step in colonizing the moon is mining lunar soil, so NASA created this competition to try to stimulate some new ideas on how to best mine the lunar soil," Ricks said. "Their main motivation for this competition is to get ideas for how to do the mining and to recruit students to work in this area."
Maneuvering on the lunar surface is a difficult problem for engineers. Lunar material is a tricky substance to roll around in and it is easy for a robot to get stuck, Ricks said. Also, teams have come up with a number of unique approaches to mine the soil on the moon.
Ricks said that while students get to learn engineering concepts, build a robot and compete, they also get the opportunity to speak to recruiters with sponsoring corporations during the week.
"These students get to go to the competition and they get to network with professionals with these companies, and these companies are there to recruit," Ricks said. "It is a big-time aspect of the competition."
Several students have been offered jobs and internships directly through their involvement with the lunabotics competition, Ricks said.
In addition to prize money won at the competition, the team was invited to watch a launch at Kennedy Space Center as guests of NASA and was promised travel money to participate in a field test exercise with NASA engineers sometime during the next year.
Check out the team's 2012 lunabot at the Alabama Lunabotics website.
The team also uploaded a video on YouTube of its lunabot's runs at the competition: Comments