NASA Lunabotics

Discipline: Interdisciplinary

Advisor: Phillip Hargrove

The goal of the NASA Lunabotics Senior Design team is to develop the first ever quadrupedal excavator for the NASA Lunabotics competition. NASA conducts this robotic mining competition each year in a simulated lunar environment to garner inspiration from student designs for design problems that NASA may be facing. The project is an interdisciplinary effort comprised of two senior design teams, faculty researchers, and student volunteers. This structure will allow UCF to improve on the design year by year by developing a multi-disciplinary pipeline of contributors. The three main focuses of the project are Locomotion, Autonomy and Mission Control, and Excavation. The Autonomy and Mission Control team consists of a CS senior design team tasked with making the robot and its operations fully autonomous. The Excavation and Locomotion teams are interdisciplinary teams composed of students in MAE and ECE senior design. The Locomotion team’s mission is to develop a functional quadrupedal robot that can operate in the simulated lunar environment. The Excavation team’s goal is to construct a lightweight regolith excavator to collect, store, and deposit regolith in the challenge environment. The work of the individual teams will culminate into an autonomous robot that is capable of in-site resource utilization to construct protective berms in a lunar environment.

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