Their final design project asked the teams of four to develop a proof of concept prototype for a small-scale autonomous lunar vehicle (ALV). It had to perform the task of delivering antennas to various locations on the lunar surface.

“We’re building off the Grand Challenges for advancing science,” says Sean Brophy, associate professor of Engineering Education. “One of the things astrophysicists need is information from deep space. So one of the things we’re doing is trying to figure out a way to get the antennas they need on the dark side of the moon.”

The National Academy of Engineering’s Grand Challenges for Engineering includes 14 challenges for the profession to address in the 21^st Century. The teams focused on engineering the tools of scientific discovery – specifically, an ALV that can maneuver around the moon, drop antennas to support information gathering and communication efforts, and then return back to a home base.

“We gave students a lot of different ways they can navigate the system,” Brophy says. That includes canyon walls to help triangulate where the ALV is located and a simulated satellite system using Bluetooth technology. There’s also lunar “debris” and rough terrain the ALVs must navigate through or around as they complete their mission.

The class industry partner is Harris Corporation, which served as the teams’ client. John Cameron, principal investigator in the Global Unmanned Systems Group at Harris, says while he is looking at the end result of whether the ALVs succeed, just as important is how the teams worked on the problem.

“We give them this very difficult, large, unstructured problem that’s really hard to digest,” he says, “that it makes them have to break it up into smaller chunks. It makes them have to learn the engineering process right off the bat.”

“We’ll ask teams that may be 100% successful, how did you become successful?” Cameron says. “Was it blind luck or did you really engineer a good solution?”

He says even for teams that did not achieve the goal, he can get a sense of whether they had a good design and whether there was a lot of thought put into it.

“You learn a lot about how you can’t succeed at everything,” says FYE honors student Michael Reinhold. “(Our ALV) functioned better than during testing phases, and it functioned better than the worst-case scenario. It accomplished some of its goals at hand, which is fantastic.”

For Reinhold’s teammate, Anne Roach, the experience was valuable no matter the ALV’s performance.

“All of us had different ideas,” she says, “and seeing how we were able to combine them together, so we could get the best product in the end… having that experience is really what I’m taking away from this.”