NASA Gears Up for the Regolith Rumble

eldavojohn writes "NASA is holding another scientific challenge to see which autonomous robot can move the most regolith in 30 minutes. The finer details: 'To win the cash prizes for NASA's Regolith Challenge, teams must demonstrate fully autonomous robots capable of collecting at least 330 pounds (150 kilograms) of mock Moon dirt within 30 minutes. Whichever robot moves the most regolith over the benchmark limit, while still meeting contest specifications, wins, NASA said. But in order to compete, lunar regolith excavators must weigh less than 88 pounds (40 kilograms) and run on less than 30 kilowatts of power, according to contest rules.'"

Comments

Winner?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems that, while building your robot to carry alot of dirt seems the most obvious way to move the dirt, my bet is that the winner ends up trading off some of its capacity for speed. My guess is, considering the amount of effort people put into thesee things, everyone will be doing extensive tests to see, energy lost for each journey compared to enery lost by carrying alot at the same time, then of course by carrying half the weight you need to be 4x as fast, becuase of the fact you have to make the journey there and back to collect dirt to move it.

So this is what they needed the fake moon dust for

[The_mad_linguist]

From this article,
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/2 9/1450233

Interesting...

Go slow and multiply

[nietsch]

remember they only have 30 watts to spend, so anything that involves a lot of accerlerating and braking is out of the question. Solution: use a conveyor belt (at least one of the entrants will). Just take tiny bites and transport it slowly to the dumpsite, but use a lot of buckets in the chain, so that the total transported load is high enough. 150 Kilo in 30 minutes means 5 kilo per minute => 10 loads of 500 gram per minute.
In fact, on another scale this is what is being done in stripmines, so you can copy part of their solution: excavators that transport the dirt with conveyors. Given the size of the sandbox with no obstacles, programming it should not be too hard.