Fourth-year students in Laurentian University’s mechanical engineering program are preparing to defend their title at the 2012 NASA Lunabotics Competition, being held May 21-26 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Last year, the students won first place out of 40 universities in the international competition.
The contest requires students to design and build a remote-operated device that can dig and deposit at least 10 kilograms of simulated lunar material within an allotted time. There will be a new challenge this year, with lunabots scoring extra points if they are fully autonomous and are not remote controlled.
“The machine will have to think for itself,” said Markus Timusk, faculty adviser and professor at the Bharti School of Engineering, in a news release. “It has to determine where it is, build a map and navigate around craters and rocks in the field. To get the maximum points, it has to locate and then automatically excavate in the mining area, then navigate back to the hopper and dock itself, and then dump its payload. This competition is a whole new order of magnitude more challenging.”
Last year, the Laurentian team earned first place after its lunabot excavated more than 237 kilograms of material in the allotted timeframe.
This year, lunabots will earn extra points for dust-free operation and dust-tolerant design features, and will lose points for weight.
The design challenges are extremely ambitious, said Dr. Ramesh Subramanian, director of the Bharti School of Engineering.
“The level these students are working at, the caliber of their design work, is really amazing,” Subramanian said. “To be working weekends and evenings on a project like this, and to be solving mechatronics problems that are so difficult, is just so impressive.”
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