Illinois Team among top ten in NASA Lunabotics Competition

For most engineering students at Illinois, the sky’s the limit. Members of one interdisciplinary student organization are looking to go even further than that into space. Each year, Illinois Robotics in Space (IRIS) designs a robot excavator to mine the moon’s soil (called regolith).

In May, a team of eight IRIS members attended NASA’s Lunabotics Mining Competition at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. and returned home with a third place finish out of 55 U.S. and international teams in the Systems Engineering Paper portion of the competition.

“One of the main goals of this competition, from NASA's perspective as they mentioned at the awards banquet, is for students to learn the systems engineering design process and see how important and useful it is in real world engineering projects,” said IRIS president Jordan Holquist. “We are very excited to have done so well in this category.”

NASA’s annual competition, now in its third year, pits teams of undergraduate and graduate students from universities around the globe against each other in a design challenge. The goal: build a remotely operated or autonomous excavator, called a lunabot, to collect and deposit the most simulated lunar soil in a specified timeframe. The robots are also required to navigate an obstacle course that simulates the moon’s surface, both when empty and when carrying cargo.

In addition to navigation and excavation activities, teams are judged in a number of other areas, including team spirit, best use of social media, educational outreach, slide presentation, and more. Overall, the IRIS team placed tenth out of the 55 teams represented this year, an improvement over its 19th place finish out of 36 teams in 2011.

Guanyang Luo (BSME ’12) was IRIS vice-president and representative to Engineering Design Council in 2011-2012. He attributes the team’s improvement to its multidisciplinary approach of having students from several different disciplines working on the project together.

“The majority of the club is still aerospace engineering, spread out through the entire project, and I feel like aerospace engineering is more systems engineering oriented,” Luo said. “I think MechSE students work more on actually carrying out the design for mechanical systems…and with integration, things like that.”

IRIS improved its performance this year by overcoming significant challenges. At the competition, parts failed, but the team was able to replace or fix them in time. Because the team could not test their design on the actual lunar regolith simulant that NASA used for the competition, members had to make on-the-spot adjustments to the electrical system, control code, and manual motor settings to calibrate the system for driving on the uniquely sandy, dusty terrain after they got to the Kennedy Space Center.

The team was not able to overcome all challenges, however. While the lunabot passed communications, weight, and size inspections, got points for dust tolerance, and drove on the simulated lunar surface, problems with the communications system prevented the team from excavating any of the regolith simulant.

“While we did not excavate any regolith this year, we are all very proud as a team for the great advancements we made with the Lunabotics project this year,” Holquist said.

Closer to home, IRIS participated in the 2012 Engineering Open House with a demonstration of interface technology, robotics, and automation. They exhibited the drawings and physical hardware of their Lunabotics project. Additionally, thanks to an Xbox Kinect motion sensing input device, visitors to the IRIS exhibit had the opportunity to remotely control a robotic arm with their own arm movements. The group’s exhibit earned third place for “Presentation of Society.”

“That just means we’re kind of on the uphill, which is fun,” said Holquist.

Luo said he got involved with IRIS because of his interest in robotics, but has enjoyed the opportunity to apply what he learned in the classroom.

“Just having something that you built with your own hands, that you designed, that really gives you an appreciation of what good engineering is,” Luo said.