The very word moonwalk brings to mind the King of Pop Michael Jackson. But that’s for laymen like us. Not the 10 brainy students of GITAM University in Visakhapatnam. Taking it rather literally, they have designed a Lunabot __ a Mars Curiosity kind of rover which can strut about on the surface of the moon.
The team, of whom eight hail from Hyderabad, was among six selected from India to represent the country at the third annual Lunabotics Mining Competition organized by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the US between May 21 and 26. The only team from Andhra Pradesh secured an honorary mention for the best innovation and came fourth among 65 teams across the globe.
“The selection process was tough and we qualified through round one of screening the idea and round two which involved presenting a video of the working model of the Lunabot,” explained PVSS Siddharth, team- member and a second-year student of Industrial Engineering at GITAM. Initially, 16 teams were selected in the first round and the number was narrowed down to seven for the second phase.
The process of designing an optimum Lunabot took around four months with parallel process of design and software development. The final model weighed 60 kg and was 1.4-metre long and 0.7-metre high. “We used different materials such as aluminium, mild steel, acrylic and stainless steel. The communication is through Wifi where a laptop mounted in the robot is synced with the router of NASA and can be controlled from half a kilometre distance,” said Siddharth.
The robot can dig the Uranium-rich surface of the moon known as ‘Regolith’ and send samples to the lunar base. Students from different streams including mechanical engineering, electrical and electronics as well as IT streams chipped in to finalize the design apart from industrial engineering students. The technical team lead was provided by T Sridhar in collaboration with Shaik Abdul Shariq and SM Saifuddin Malik. The electrical and communications team was led by Bhimani Janki with team members P Srichandan Reddy, A Aditya Saastry and K Nishanth.