Who Are We?

Purdue Lunabotics is a student organization at Purdue University that has been designing, building and operating lunar robots to compete at the NASA Lunabotics Competition for over a decade. 

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Our Competition

We compete in the Annual NASA Lunabotics Competition which is one week long and is held at the NASA's Kennedy Space Center in mid-May. Since 2010, this competition has challenged university student teams to design and build a lunar mining or construction robot while applying system engineering principles. Learn more at the link below.

NASA LUNABOTICS COMPETITION Website

History

Purdue Lunabotics was founded in 2012 and has been making robots ever since. In 2015 and 2016 we placed 2nd overall at the NASA Competition and in 2023 the competition was hosted at the University of Alabama and our team was awarded 3rd place in Autonomy and collected the 5th most gravel out of the 20+ teams competing. 

40+

Members

2nd

Top Finish

400+

Components

1000+

Collective Hours Spent

See Our 2022-2023 Robot In Action

Engineering Disciplines

Mechanical

Our mechanical teams are responsible for designing the robot in CAD (Solid works), preforming structural analysis (FEA) and manufacturing (CNC, Lathe, Waterjet, etc.)  a completely new robot each year.

Electrical

Our electrical team designs and fabricates custom PCB boards, controllers, sensors, etc. They also design the power distribution system and select appropriate off the shelf components to power and control the robot. 

Software

Out software team is responsible for making the robot controllable in both teleoperation and autonomous modes. This is no easy task! We use cutting edge algorithms for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), Navigation and Behavior Planning. We also develop lower level controllers and sensor data acquisition systems.

Systems

The Systems Engineering (SE) team is the backbone of our design process. They set-up and manage our design process through its entire lifecycle. We follow a tailored version of NASA's system engineering guidelines and employ many SE practices used industry.  

Our Sponsors

FAQ

Our team is mostly made up of Mechanical, Electrical, Aerospace and Computer Engineering majors as well as Computer Science and Polytech majors. But all majors are welcome to join!!

We do not require any previous experience to join. If you have experience, that is great, you will be able to jump right in and start contributing immediately. If not, no worries we have training programs that will teach you everything you need to know!

We have 7 hours of general meetings each week. For new members especially you should be able to do the majority of your work during these meetings. In general the more you put in the more you are able to get out of Lunabotics! 

Lunabotics VIP is a class that is associated with the club and led by our advisor Dr. Nichole Ramirez. The class gives you an opportunity to get credit for participation in Purdue Lunabotics. However, it does also come with additional deliverables and class time. Lunabotics VIP is generally made up mostly First Year Engineering students.