Astro-Huskies Enterprise Team Competing in NASA Lunabotics Finals
Astro-Huskies, a subteam of the Multiplanetary Innovation Enterprise (MINE) at Michigan Tech, is participating in the final round of NASA's Lunabotics Challenge from May 15-17. It is the team's third time competing in person at the Kennedy Space Center.
The Astro-Huskies advanced to the on-site competition after the qualifying round, held May 11-15 at the University of Central Florida's Exolith Lab Regolith Bin.
The Lunabotics Challenge requires designing, building and testing an autonomous construction robot that can travel through an obstacle area and perform a designated task. It is one of several inter-university NASA competitions with goals aligned with NASA's ongoing Artemis missions.
The competition requires a systems engineering approach, which is an elaborate version of the engineering design process, as well as public outreach events and a heavy focus on automation.
An unavoidable obstacle of space travel is what NASA calls the space gear ratio. To send one package into space, you need nearly 450 times that package's mass in expensive rocket fuel. So, in order to establish a long-term presence on other planets and moons, we need to be able to effectively acquire resources in those locations, known as in situ resource utilization, or ISRU.
The NASA Lunabotics Challenge allows university student teams to show what autonomous robots they have developed to traverse around obstacles, such as mounds, craters and rocks, before they can begin assisting in construction of a landing pad by creating berms and flattening the landing area. By demonstrating their robot, teams contribute ideas to NASA's future missions that will operate and produce consumables on the lunar surface.
You can watch the Astro-Huskies' rover, STELLAR, make its qualifying run on YouTube.