You have a few days before your presentation at the final round of the NASA competition and it turns out that the shipment with the most important element of your presentation, the robot, got lost by the courier. What do you do? Simple – you build another robot!
That is exactly what Adam Karcz and his colleagues did. They were the only European team to advance to the finale of the 2013 NASA Lunabotics Mining Competition. For their final presentation, all teams were to present their “lunar excavators” – robots capable to extract and move a 10kg Moon rock in only 10 minutes. It took an entire year for this Warsaw Polytechnic team to build the robot, called Husar, for this competition, but upon their arrival in Florida for the competition finale, it turned out that the courier delivered only one of two packages they shipped. The most important elements of the robot, the construction and most of the electronics, were unfortunately missing.
Faced with this tough reality, Adam and his team quickly decided that failure was not an option and decided to spend the next few days rebuilding the robot. The support for this team came from all over: the other contestants made their parts and tools available to them, the judges moved forward their presentation date, and all of the Kennedy Space Center cheered for them. And it worked – Adam’s team rebuilt Husar the robot. Even though they didn’t win the main prize, they were recognized for their work and received the Perseverance Award.
This was the last year for the international edition of NASA’s Lunabotics Competition. Starting in 2014, only American students will be able to participate. Team Husar, however, is not giving up and is thinking of organizing an international lunar robotics competition in Poland.
By the way, the missing package containing Husar, the robot, is nowhere to be found.