Two years ago, Stevens Robotics Club had only five members and was struggling to survive as an organization. Now, the club is thriving, boasting a membership of nearly 40 and a record-high budget from the Student Government Association. Their growth is the result of a team of dedicated students from several disciplines who are primed to tackle their biggest challenge yet: the NASA Robotic Mining Competition.
The competition, nicknamed Lunabotics, is NASA’s annual robotics challenge for undergraduate and graduate students across the nation. As part of NASA’s Artemis Mission, Lunabotics is tackling the obstacle of mining on the moon. The robots have no easy task. They must be able to drill deep into the lunar surface and extract icy regolith, which can be turned into breathable air, drinking water, and other life-supporting materials. University teams are tasked with philosophizing, designing, and building the best robot for the job.
“NASA wants to send astronauts to the Moon or to Mars, and you need to have water to do that,” said Yoohan Ko, President of Stevens Robotics Club. “But it’s not that simple, because water is too heavy and expensive. So they need to have ways to drill for the water once they get there. This competition is to find the best way to do that.”
Sights set on the competition, Stevens Robotics Club began to build their team. Twelve ambitious seniors decided to use this challenge for their senior design projects. Ryan O’Shea, the software lead for the project, said that Senior Design is one of the major advantages that their team has. “We lucked out that we already had this time set out in our schedules that we could dedicate to the project.”
The rest of the team was built by drawing from other Stevens organizations, such as IEEE and ASME. Many students were First Robotics alumni who missed the competition-driven atmosphere that they had in high school. Their first interest meeting for the project had over 50 people in attendance. As O’Shea said, “Robotics is the middle ground between all the disciplines, so it is a great opportunity for students to test their skills.”
Trent Slutzky, one of the two project leads along with Stephen Forte, described building the team as somewhat surreal.
“Stephen and I pitched the competition to Yoohan as two overambitious sophomores. A year later, we had a $25,000 budget from the SGA. That’s unheard of. But they loved our idea and the interest was there.”
On top of the money that the school gave to the project, the team has received outside donations from organizations like SICK AG and Hoboken’s Rocket Club.
Despite the support on campus, the team has faced challenges.
For one, the design specifications have become more specific, which has only added to the difficulty of the task. Every year, the challenge is updated to respond to the quality of the robots entered. This time around, the weight maximum decreased, so the teams have to incorporate the same functionality into a smaller, lighter frame. The final robot also has to dig deeper, all while optimizing power usage and cost efficiency — more mechanisms in less space.
As Slutzky said, “Thinking about sending things into space, we have to be practical. Every pound makes it harder to bring along, so for the project a heavy weight will deduct points.” O’Shea continued, “Even communication bandwidth is limited on the moon, so the robot must function with limited communication controls.”
To tackle such a complicated problem, the team has split up into five smaller subteams: Chassis (load-bearing framework/wheels), Software, Electrical, End-Effector, and Dispensing teams. Every team has weekly reports on their progress so that the group at large can stay on track and report back to investors.
Another obstacle for the team is that they are new in the competition field. As first-year competitors, Stevens Robotics are the underdogs. Some teams from other schools have viable prototypes from previous years that they can spend the time improving instead of starting from scratch. Other teams have such a legacy with Lunabotics that they have full facilities dedicated to the project itself. The University of Alabama has a to-scale replica of the competition room that they can use to test their robot in competition conditions.
“It is true that we may have less resources and experience, but the school has been really great in giving us space to work in the machine shop,” Ko remarked. “We can’t manufacture things at the same level, but we can 3D print to our exact specifications.”
The Stevens Robotics Club has another secret weapon: their dedication to the team. They have a rigorous schedule: two days a week of intensive and mandatory work, with some team members working many more days of the week.
As O’Shea said, “[The team] comes out every Saturday morning when they could be doing literally anything else. Most of the town is still asleep, and we are hard at work.”
The dedication of every member points towards the success of the team, now and in the future. Underclassmen are given leadership positions so that they will take over as project leads in the coming years.
Ko explains that “taking over this club has opened up so many opportunities. If a student has an idea for a project, we can actually support them through it and give them a small stipend to work on it. Someone wanted to build a hydroponic farm, and I was like, go for it!”
The competition will be held at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in May. Fifty teams from around the country will be there. It occurs the same week as senior commencement, from which the graduating team members will leave early to be at the competition on time.
All of the members of the team are excited about the future of the project and want the community at Stevens to know that new members can still join for the fabrication phase of the project or join next year.
“It is really hard to take a project like this to fruition,” Ko said. “Ideas don’t bring a project like this to life. It requires passion from every individual.”
Be First to Comment