Table of Contents Chapter 1 GETTING COMPETITIVE 4 Chapter 2 EARLY ROBOT COMPETITIONS 10 Chapter 3 MANY CHALLENGES 14 Chapter 4 FUTURE ROBOTICS 23 Glossary 30 Index 31
4 Chapter 1 GETTING COMPETITIVE In 2022 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA hosted the Lunabotics Junior Contest The contest challenged students from kindergarten through twelfth grade to create a robot that could be used in future missions on the moon The robot had to be able to dig up soil from one area of the lunar south pole and move it to a future Artemis moon base about 328 feet 100 m away Robots could be no larger than 3.5 x 2 x 2 feet 1.1 x 0.6 x 0.6 m
Over two thousand students sent drawings photos and diagrams to NASA Then about five hundred judges voted on the best model robots Nine year old Lucia Grisanti won the younger grade competition Her solar powered robot Olympus had spiked wheels to help it travel along the moon's surface It also had a cone shaped collector to separate dust from rocks One day Lucia wants to become an engineer and work for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory She hopes to build rovers that will travel to Venus Pluto and Ceres Researchers test the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover or VIPER mobile robot at NASA's Simulated Lunar Operations Lab in Ohio 5
