Let’s say you’re a University of Virginia student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and your student group wants to enter a prestigious NASA competition that shows that the robot you built can outperform other robots working on the moon.
The problem is that the loose rock and dust atop the lunar bedrock is a little different than the naturally occurring soil in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Fortunately, the Mechatronics and Robotics Society at UVA Engineering — MARS for short — got a little bit closer to the moon this year by landing a $86,000 grant from the Jefferson Trust to build a simulated lunar surface for robotics testing.
The project is part of a $1.5 million overall investment on Grounds by the group, with hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant monies directly benefiting engineering students.
MARS is a student-run, experimental engineering club that provides opportunities to improve hands-on skills such as design, machining and coding.
“It’s meaningful, targeted donations like these that help our students fully benefit from their experiential learning opportunities,” said Natasha Smith, a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering who advises the MARS team.
The Mission and Its Challenges
NASA will host its annual Lunabotics Challenge on May 20-22, following a qualifying round at the University of Central Florida. The prestigious competition allows engineering students, including UVA’s MARS team, to demonstrate research-and-development skills in a realistic scenario. At this competition, the best proposed solutions may one day be implemented by astronauts working on the moon.
“The competition gives NASA about 40 to 50 new ideas of how to do this each year, and they use the data to inform their own design decisions,” said fourth-year student Craig Kalkwarf, the president of MARS and a NASA Pathways intern.
This year’s challenge is to mine the moon’s surface soil, or regolith, then transport it and build a protective ground structure. The idea is that these buffers would protect areas around a launch pad.
For the students, building the testing arena — approximately 10 by 16 feet wide — may not be a matter of just handing it over to contractors. Student group members also offered in their proposal to construct the project themselves to help save costs. They currently hope to build either on Grounds or at UVA’s Milton Airfield facility, with the goal of completing the project before the end of spring.
“Currently, we test with the robot on the beach volleyball courts outside Memorial Gym,” Kalkwarf said, noting that the team has had to use sand as a proxy for the lunar surface soil. “And, as you might be able to imagine, this is far from ideal. Sand does not accurately simulate the unique properties of lunar regolith, so we are unable to accurately evaluate our designs.”
He added, “This has caused us issues at competition before; specifically, last year when we tested our robot in sand, the robot worked as we expected, and we were able to fill the construction bin multiple times in a simulated 15-minute run. When we got to competition, however, we struggled to collect more than a dusting of regolith due to the different properties of lunar regolith and sand. The first time we get to test accurately is at the competition, and at that point it is much too late to make changes to the design.”
Kalkwarf and mechanical leads Cayla Celis and Nayeon Son, and Eric Paschke, the group’s treasurer, created the proposal for the arena, which includes the use of 10 metric tons of research-grade lunar regolith simulant, which will be contained at more than a foot and a half depth in the arena.
Essentially, they’re recreating almost the exact conditions under which they’ll be judged.
The MARS team expressed their gratitude to the Jefferson Trust for helping them stay competitive.
For this year, the team will have to proceed into the robot design phase without the benefit of the arena, with hopes that there will at least be some time for testing before the late-May competition.
Other Projects Receiving Funds
Other engineering projects, totaling almost $150,000 in additional funds, were supported by the Jefferson Trust Foundation:
- $86,987 for a “Safeguarding Science” initiative. The Department of Systems and Information Engineering project will develop “a taxonomy of scientific fraud.” The group will help identify types of wrongdoing, identify involved organizations and examine their motivations. At the end of the process, engineering tools and methods will be proposed to address the problems.
- $30,000 for the Cyber Systems and Operations speaker series, also proposed by the Department of Systems and Information Engineering, which will bring industry experts to the classroom to enhance students’ critical thinking skills in preparation for careers in cybersecurity.
- $30,000 for The Jefferson Engineering Lectureship at UVA. The Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering proposed the series, which will bring experts in the fields of data science, healthcare and environmental sciences to present on topics of interdisciplinary innovation.
In all, this year’s philanthropy funded 17 new projects and programs across the University. Student experiences, enhancing learning through internship and research opportunities, and community outreach were key grant themes this year.
Founded by the University of Virginia Alumni Association, the Jefferson Trust has invested over $15.8 million in student, faculty and staff ideas since its inception in 2006.
