EE - Design, Development, and Demonstration for National Robotics Challenges

This project provides students with an opportunity to develop and demonstrate robotic systems through participation in national and international robotics competitions and challenge programs organized by agencies and organizations such as NASA, DARPA, NSF, and other government, academic, and industry partners.

Students will form interdisciplinary teams to identify relevant competition opportunities, analyze challenge requirements, develop engineering concepts, and design, build, and test robotic systems or computational solutions. Depending on the specific competition, projects may involve areas such as bioinspired robotics, autonomous navigation, manipulation, locomotion, aerial or underwater robotics, human-robot interaction, swarm robotics, and robotics for extreme environments.

The project will emphasize the complete engineering development cycle, including:

• Identifying and evaluating suitable robotics competitions and challenges.
• Translating competition requirements into technical specifications and system-level objectives.
• Developing innovative robotic concepts and selecting appropriate hardware, sensors, actuators, and control architectures.
• Modeling, simulation, prototyping, and experimental validation.
• Developing autonomous or semi-autonomous robotic behaviors.
• Iteratively improving system performance based on experimental results.
• Preparing technical reports, demonstrations, presentations, and competition submissions.

The specific project scope will depend on the competition selected each year. For this year, we will focus on the “NASA Competition Invites Students to Help Imagine a Future Enabled by Lunar Technologies” challenge (link).

Depending on the selected challenge, projects may begin with a conceptual or computational Phase I and potentially progress to the design, fabrication, and experimental demonstration of a physical robotic system.

The goal is not only to compete, but to give students experience in open-ended engineering design, interdisciplinary collaboration, technical communication, rapid prototyping, and solving real-world robotics problems under externally defined constraints. Successful projects may also provide opportunities for students to present their work at national competitions, workshops, conferences, and other professional venues.