Could a robot designed by young engineering students from Northern Ireland end up on the Moon? A team, from Queen's University Belfast (QUB), are heading to Florida later this month to take part in a Nasa 'lunabotics' competition. Lunabotics is a university-level competition for teams to use the Nasa systems engineering process to design, build, and operate a lunar robot.
The students created a lab-built robot that they will bring to the competition to find out how it would deal with future moon missions. The robots will be expected to dig up lunar material, drive over obstacles and use the material to form a wall. Jack Fitzpatrick, who's studying for a PhD in mechanical engineering, said "it's a great feeling" to have been invited and they're looking forward to the opportunity to take part.
The team of 10 QUB students made it to the competition following their win at the competition earlier this year. They'll be competing at the University of Central Florida against university teams from Australia, India and the US. Jamie Smith is a third-year electrical and electronic engineering student.
He explained that the team was divided into three groups for software, electronics and mechanical. Jamie was the software team lead for this project. He said their main task was to control the rover then provide the autonomous capabilities towards it.
And, they had to build rover simulations to test their software before they actually got one. Jack, however, is part of the mechanical side. "We analyse that something is physically strong enough, it's well built enough to survive this environment, it's going to have the traction to drive in this environment," he explained.
Jamie explained they designed the 52 kg aluminium frame robot rover and took it compete at a competition in Milton Keynes. We ended up winning the competition and had great fun," he said. Then a few weeks later, they were invited to compete at Nasa's international Lunabotics competition.
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