A Southern Illinois University Carbondale team received first place in NASA’s annual robotics mining competition.
The contest, LUNABOTS, featured dozens of teams from around the country. It started last fall and recently ended with an awards ceremony.
Clark Lindsay, a senor in mechanical engineering and computer science and team leader from Creal Springs, said students receive practical experience in the full engineering lifecycle process.
A panel of judges from NASA scored the entries.
Lindsay said the competition required the teams to design and create a 3D computer-aided drawing of their own mining robot. They also had to write a research paper on the steps and reasoning they used to arrive at their design, as well as how they plan to improve the design next year.
“We were asked to present a design for a robot that can function on the moon, driving, avoiding obstacles and mining through a layer of dust, and then extracting gravel buried beneath the dust,” Lindsay said. “This is to simulate navigating and extracting ice from beneath the surface of the moon.”
