Left to right: Dr. Helferty, Mark Sitch, David Fiel, Ali Abdulhay, Blake Bray and Darshan Patel.
Temple Robotics dug its way to success at the 2022 NASA Lunabotics competition.
The team collected 0.4kg of gravel at Kennedy Space Center this May, securing 35 out of 71 points for their overall score.
The competition challenges collegiate robotics teams to engineer a robot capable of excavating the surface of the moon to collect gravel amongst BP-1, a lunar regolith simulant. Teams that mine at least 1 kg qualify for mining points, but very few teams achieved this.
"Temple did very, very well," said John Helferty, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and the team's advisor. "We mined very well, we got into the top five, but we did not achieve qualification status that NASA required."