SOCORRO, N.M. – New Mexico Tech students recently returned from a NASA competition that challenges college students to design, build, and operate an autonomous lunar miner. New Mexico Tech competed for the first time along with other schools from across the country in the NASA Lunabotics Challenge, held May 22-27, 2022, at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The New Mexico Tech team received the Nova Award for stellar system engineering performance by a first-year team and the Project Management Plan Award from NASA. 

NASA invited Dr. Arvin Ebrahimkhanlou, assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering, to the Lunabotics challenge after his team placed second nationally in another NASA competition, NASA MINDS 2021. Many of the Lunabotic team members were alumni of last year's NASA MINDS competition.

New Mexico Tech’s 2022 Lunabotics student design team and its bot, “D.A.V.I.D.,” embody what it is to be a Tech engineer, according to Dr. Curtis O’Malley, assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering and outreach coordinator for STEM activities within the department. He said Tech’s team set out less than a year ago to field a team for the NASA Lunabotics competition, which he described as one of the most technically challenging collegiate design competitions in the world. The competition calls for teams to design, build, and test a lunar rover that has to navigate a simulated lunar surface, reach a dig site, excavate and extract rock samples, and return them to the launch site. 

“The competition is so challenging that few teams can successfully design and fabricate a bot in the first year of competition,” he said. “Even many experienced teams that make it to the competition cannot get their bot to drive in the lunar environment due to the harshness of the conditions. And beyond that, few have ever been able to get an auger system to extract rock samples into the bot’s collection hopper.”  

Dr. O’Malley reported that the New Mexico Tech student team performed all of its tasks through detailed and well-organized engineering design and experimentation that combined students from the Mechanical Engineering Design Clinic, Electrical Engineering Club, and Computer Science Club. 

“The students' sound engineering and thoughtful and detail-oriented approach led them to overcome challenges that were insurmountable for other schools that had the benefit of previous competition experiences in the NASA Lunar yard,” he said.

Student team lead Mario Escarcega said he’s proud of the effort his team put into the bot’s entire system and the success they achieved in their first year in the national competition.

“Our auger is one of the first in Lunabotics history to deliver rocks to the dumping mechanism,” he said. “Our locomotion system was incredibly robust against loose regolith and even boulders. As a first-year competition team, we impressed students, advisors, judges, and bystanders alike. Most robots couldn’t navigate around obstacles."

Mehgan Cephus, co-lead for the mechanical sub-team, said the difficulties faced in the competition could not have been foreseen, not knowing the properties of the regolith, the loose unconsolidated rock and dust they maneuvered their bot through.

“While our rock collection was lower than the top-ranking teams, we were still able to complete more tasks than other seasoned teams and stood proudly amongst the teams,” she said. 

Dr. Arvin Ebrahimkhanlou, assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering and team advisor, said that unlike most teams that had very similar design concepts, the Tech team used an original, unique design.

“NMT's team was one of the only two teams who used an auger for excavation and one of the only two teams who used treads for locomotion,” he said. “We introduced a new flexible auger shell concept that perfectly performed dust mitigation and sieved rocks during excavation. By any measure, NMT's team exceeded the expectations and raised the bar for future first-time participating teams. Few, if any, first-time attendees achieve this much. In terms of autonomy, our robot has partial autonomy and uses its own camera and telemetry for robot-controlled operation rather than NASA-provided overhead cameras.”

Dr. Seokbin (Bin) Lim, chair of the New Mexico Tech Mechanical Engineering Department and associate professor, said that in its first year, the team went up against many unknowns and hidden difficulties.

“They came up with a fantastic result at the end with their own unique design and approach,” he said. “I would like to praise this team highly because of their dedication and commitment for an extended period of time during the construction of this robot. I can't imagine how much time they had spent to overcome never-ending difficulties. They rocked the competition.”

The team also raised money to fund the Lunabotics lab, build the robot, and travel to Florida for the competition. The funding for the team to participate in this competition was provided by NASA, New Mexico Space Grant Consortium, fundraising by students, donations from local companies, the Office of the Vice President of Academic Affairs, the Mechanical Engineering Department, and Tech's aerospace program.

In addition, the Office of Vice President for Research and IRIS PASCCAL provided the team with the space to build a testing facility, which was central to the team's success. The team also was a finalist in the NASA MINDS competition. The Tech team also participated in the 2022 Excellence Senior Design Conference at the University of Texas at Dallas on its way to Florida. The team’s presentation of its robot’s system earned the Teamwork Award.

Tech Lunabotics team members include: Mario Escarcega, Meghan Cephus, Donovan Caruso, Trung Le, Ethan Oesch, Juliana Barstow, Autumn Weber, Nicolas Sheerin, Nakii Tsosie, Quincy Bradfield, Marshal Gold, Jordan Tesillo, Kaleb Bjorkmann, Skyler Hughes, Alex Bethel, and Joseph Coston.

New Mexico Tech’s team can be seen in videos from the May 24 livestream feeds from NASA at: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M7ufpy61Eow and https://youtu.be/M7ufpy61Eow?t=25272