In my junior and senior year in college, I entered the NASA Lunar Robotics Mining Competition with a group of classmates and friends at NYU-Poly, also known as Lunabotics. The competition is an international robotics competition where students from any college can participate in designing, building and operating a robot to navigate and collect lunar regolith simulant in an obstacle course designed to mimic the lunar terrain. The winner would be determined by the total weight of regolith collected at the end of a 10 minute run. Lunar regolith holds many minerals which could be useful in furthering space exploration and NASA is interested in the potential of sending autonomous robots to collect the lunar soil and process it into resources that could be used for future space exploration missions, whether is for resupplying missions further into our solar system and galaxy or to supply continuous lunar habitation missions.

In our first year at the competition, the rules were set that robots had to fit in a 0.75 m x 0.75 m x 1.5 m volume and weigh no more than 80 kgs. We began by heavily researching the lunar rover and other exploration robots that have been previously sent to the moon to better understand the environment and the design challenges that faced these robots. The very soil we aimed to collect poses many dangers to robots, particularly the physical material properties. Lunar regolith is a very fine abrasive material with a very high angle of repose. The major challenges that we would face would be abrasion and loss of traction. Based on studying the robots from the previous year’s competition, we arrived at the conclusion that a system of treads would be most effective at traversing the terrain and a conveyor belt system would be the most effective at collecting the regolith in a short amount of time.

This is the final design of the robot built for the 2011 Lunabotics competition by the team. We were able to get the robot to navigate through the obstacle course to the mining area however, we had underestimated the size of loose rocks that were said to be contained in the regolith and one particularly long yet thin piece of shale became lodged in our conveyor belt system and caused catastrophic failure. Furthermore, only after a few more minutes of driving, the regolith accumulated to a point inside the tread driving belt to cause failure to our locomotive systems as well.

The following year, we made significant changes to our design based on our lessons learned from the previous competition. The rules had also changed to include a clause where points would be deducted based on the robot’s weight. For every kilogram the robot weighed, it had to collect 10 kilograms of regolith to break even in points.ed away from a tread system for locomotion and conveyor belt for mining to a 4WD system and a bucket wheel drum to collect the soil. We created custom metal wheels that did not have the same problems with loss of traction and wear from previous years. The wheels were also hollow and the rear views had a collection system such that when the robot was driven forward, they would fill with regolith, increasing the robot’s weight and thus increasing our traction but without the loss of points. The bucket drum had a lower collection rate and capacity than the conveyor belt but was far more robust in many situations. In fact, during the robotics competition, due to a crater, we found our robot flipped on its face, an occurrence that often meant the end of a robot’s operation but with the bucket drum arm, our robot was the only one able to upright itself and continued it’s operation.

We placed 6th overall out of 55 competing teams and were award with the 2012 Innovation Award and placed 3rd in team spirit award.

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