NASA Lunabotics Competition (College of DuPage 2022)

Overview

From Fall 2021 to Spring 2022, I led the College of DuPage robotics team (Engineering and Technology Club) in competing at the NASA Lunabotics competition.

The effect of quarantine a year prior was that almost nobody was recruited, and when all the sophomores transferred out, only two members remained in the club: Faiza and me. However, we were pretty ambitious. So, we built up from two members, an entirely new team, and designed and manufactured an original mining robot in less than 9 months.

The robot would compete against mostly four-year institutions (COD is a two-year institution) earning 12th place overall and a 3rd place autonomy award out of 71 total competing teams at the 2022 NASA Lunabotics competition.

Here's a video demonstrating the robot a month out before the competition:

The team and faculty at College of DuPage were the ones who genuinely made it all possible. I'm indebted to all the people that stepped up for the this project. Thank you to the students: Abdullah Ali, Brenda Amador, Josef Brania, Oliver Burrus, Stavros Dellis, Zachary Egert, Anjanette Francisco, John Greager, Maxwell Harris, Faiza Khan, Nayal Merchant, Soka Suliman, Jaden Tran, Nick Vasquez, Elijah Wilkinson and Giovanni Zavalza. And the faculty: Tom Carter, William Toldness, and Bob Clark. I'd also like to thank my family for supporting me so much throughout the entire project.

Epic team photo

Management

To manage the project better, I read this book: Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager. I love this book. It covers a wide range of project management topics but then distills each topic down to its most essential points before providing a simple but practical method to apply those concepts. It completely changed the way I managed this project and projects since then.

Programming

I supported programming as well. We used ROS (C++ and Python) to build the robotics program and a part of this was building a ROS package to interface with the Talon FX motors from VEX robotics.

Since we were all freshman and sophomore students, our team had pretty limited experience with programming. We had no advisor to help with programming either, and the extent of what we knew about robotics programming was limited to what I knew from the year prior. This was also 2021, just before LLMs became prolific for handling these types of situations, so we had no choice but to rely entirely on tutorials, reference documentation, and forum posts to get ROS running.

I think knowing this context frames our 3rd place autonomy award as a more significant achievement than it may have been for an experienced team or a team benefitting from the use of LLMs. Specifically, that we took a completely unfamiliar technology and in a very short amount of time, learned it and applied it to outperform many experienced teams is what makes this an achievement I'm still very proud about.

Additional Photos

A free Crave Clutch™ box we got from our White Castle sponsorship

High-tech NASA brick technology weighing down the front of the robot

A view of the finished robot from the back featuring ETC-chan

The 2023 ETC-chan redesign commemorating the final moments of the 2022 competition