Student News
Lunabotic’s Team Shows Growth at National Challenge
At the end of the academic year, one of our newer student teams had a strong showing at a national competition at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The UR Lunabotics Team sent a contingent of 14 students to the Lunabotics Challenge, up from the seven who went last year for their first time competing in the national event.
To improve the design of their off-world construction robot this year, the students said they implemented a servo drive to provide real-time feedback to the control system to make real-time adjustments and maintain accuracy, an auger screw for deposition, steel buckets for collecting regolith instead of 3D-printed ones for greater strength, and made better strides at using autonomy code. Of the 38 teams competing, UR Lunabotics placed 13th in the STEM engagement report, 18th in presentation and demonstration, 23rd in systems engineering paper, and 26th in project management plan.
“We had a lot of fun moments during the trip,” says Weiting Tan ’27 (electrical and computer engineering). “Everyone loves wearing the protective suits in the comp field and we took some funny pictures with the suit on. One especially heart-warming moment is when two members, Josh and Alex, brought homemade hardtack to share with the team. At that time, we were feeling tense due to new issues with the robot, and the hardtacks helped us de-stress a lot and lift the team’s spirit.”
While on the trip, the team also visited the Kennedy Space Center and got to watch SpaceX launch a Falcon 9 rocket. We’re proud to support our students through these important experiential learning opportunities!
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