UIC students won first place in the Robotic Construction competition during NASA’s 2025 Lunabotics Challenge at the Astronauts Memorial Foundation’s Center for Space Education in Florida earlier this month.
Lunabotics is an annual contest at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. Student competitors design and build an autonomous and remote-controlled robot to navigate a lunar surface in support of the ArtemisMission, a series of missions to return to the moon. The Robotic Construction competition, one of several competitions during Lunabotics, challenged teams to use their robot to excavate, transport and deposit lunar regolith simulant, a material similar to the rock, dirt and other materials available on the moon, to build berms and demonstrate effective lunar surface construction techniques.
UIC’s Lunabotics team is part of the Engineering Design Team student organization. The interdisciplinary team members at the competition were biomedical engineering student Scott Morabito; electrical and computer engineering students Colton Diederich, Catherine Schuch, Aiden Smith, Samin Sohrabi and Adrian Tse; liberal arts and sciences student Aakash Bajaj; and mechanical and industrial engineering students Charles Brailovsky, George Ciuca, Davin Doan, Nimai Kamdar, Fernanda Palomar and team Elijah Wilkinson. Mechanical and industrial engineering assistant professor Pranav Bhounsule accompanied the team as its faculty advisor.
The challenge began with UIC competing against 36 schools in a qualifying round at the University of Central Florida. UIC came out on top, advancing to the final round of 10 teams at NASA, where they were successful in harvesting the lunar regolith.
“We had the best robot and performed the best,” Wilkinson said. “It’s a significant award, and we’re all thrilled.”
“It’s very gratifying. The team spent a lot of time working on this robot and seeing it all pay off and celebrating with the people I’ve worked with all year was an amazing experience,” Schuch added.
One of the keys to winning was taking risks and pushing the limits of the robot early in the process while they were testing it at the UIC MakerSpace.
“Test early, test hard and break it to understand where it breaks,” Wilkinson said. “We were testing two months before the competition, and the first time we tested, I said, ‘Put everything to 100% output because that’s how we’re driving in the competition. If we’re going to break something, we need to break it as soon as possible so we can start designing a solution.’ And we did break things in that testing process.”
The students also learned from one another in the interdisciplinary team.
“Being interdisciplinary is one of the coolest things about our club and one of the strongest things about it, too,” Wilkinson said. “It’s important for going into industry to have this experience with other people. You have to know how to work with programmers and electrical engineers and understand how to design and interact with those systems.”
Engineers can’t have a specialty in every single field, Schuch added. That’s why they need to learn to collaborate with people from other disciplines to be successful in their careers.
UIC also received the Innovation Award at the competition for the second year in a row. The recognition is given to teams for generating original ideas, creating efficiency and solving problems. A major part of the student design incorporates a giant industrial vibrator similar to what is used on the back of Chicago snowplow trucks with big salt containers. The vibrator shakes the salt so it doesn’t clog up. The same concept is used to prevent the regolith from clogging up. The UIC students improved on this idea to capture the judges’ attention.
“They like our design, which is very unique and something they’re interested in actually applying,” Wilkinson said.
While Wilkinson and other members have graduated and moved on to working in industry, many returning members are already planning for next year’s competition.
“We spoke with the other top 10 teams and got to see their designs. While our design won first place, other teams are starting to catch up. It’s very important that we continue to improve our design. No matter how good we think our design is, it could always be improved,” Schuch said. “We’re looking to improve the robot and see if we can win first place in the overall competition next year.”
— David Staudacher, UIC College of Engineering
