MSOE students are taking their Lunabotics senior design project to new heights after being awarded the Undergraduate Research Scholarship from the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium (WSGC). The WSGC awarded scholarships to Wisconsin students, educators, faculty and research teams conducting NASA-aligned research, STEM education and aerospace outreach across the state.

The team of mechanical engineering seniors is comprised of Mitchell Brust, Ruth Dobberpuhl, Clayton Fliss, Ethan Haselwood and Ian Rasmussen. For their senior design project, the team is designing and building a test chamber that can be used by the MSOE Lunabotics team to develop their vehicle for the annual NASA Lunabotics Competition hosted by NASA’s Artemis Program at Kennedy Space Center. The NASA Lunabotics Competition challenges university teams to design, build and operate autonomous lunar mining rovers that simulate real-world excavation tasks.

The MSOE team’s test chamber will be a smaller, more affordable version of NASA’s Artemis arena, and could be replicated by other universities in the future. “The chamber will be large enough to accommodate the Lunabotics team’s prototype moon rover and will include an air filtration system to prevent lunar regolith simulant from escaping into the lab,” explained Dobberpuhl. “Ultimately, we hope the chamber becomes a valuable resource for research, testing and community outreach.”

A portion of the $5,000 scholarship funds will support the construction of the chamber itself, while the majority of the funds will go toward purchasing regolith, which is the loose, fragmented layer of dust, soil and broken rock covering the solid bedrock on celestial bodies like Earth, the Moon and Mars. This will allow the Lunabotics team to conduct testing of their rover before the annual NASA competition in May.

The team was excited to receive this scholarship as it removed barriers and enabled them to take their project to the next level. Prior to receiving the award, they had been working on multiple concepts that would fit their budget. “We needed an option that could be built solely on senior design funds, but this heavily restricted the possibilities,” said Dobberpuhl. “The extra funds allow us to build a larger, more adaptable chamber that will enable the team to conduct everything from component-level experiments to full-system testing. It was very exciting to find out that we received the funding and were able to implement the features we had been developing.”

The team would like to thank the Mechanical Engineering Department faculty members who supported them on this project. Dr. Mathew Schaefer is the faculty mentor for this capstone team. Dr. Kevin Hart is the coordinator for capstone projects for the mechanical engineering program. Adjunct Associate Professor Michael Swedish and Dr. Bill Farrow are the faculty advisors of the Lunabotics organization. The team was also assisted by Rachel Westrum, grants administrator in the Applied Technology Center, who helped them prepare the proposal before it was submitted to WSGC.

Pictured left to right: Clayton Fliss, Ethan Haselwood, Ian Rasmussen, Dr. Mathew Schaefer, Ruth Dobberpuhl and Mitchell Brust.