The mining industry tends to focus on what’s below the Earth’s surface, but a US contest has university students looking to the sky for the future of mining. More specifically, the annual NASA Robotic Mining Competition asks students to design and build a mining robot that could work on Mars.

The Iowa State University (ISU) Lunabotics Club has participated since the first competition in 2010, and they will be back again at this year’s event, which is to be held May 18–22, 2015, at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. The more than 40 students in the club have been working on their robot much of the academic year in the basement of the Nuclear Engineering Laboratory on the ISU campus. The school, located in the US Midwest, is a public university of nearly 35,000 students with highly regarded science and engineering programs.

“The NASA Robotic Mining Competition is an excellent program to provide students in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields with hands-on training and experience in attacking real engineering issues related to vehicle design, build, test and operation,” says Jim Heise, Faculty Advisor to the ISU Lunabotics Club.

It also makes for more well-rounded engineers. “It’s helped me with my project management skills, my mechanical design skills, my communication skills, my presentation skills — everything all around,” says Garrett Schieber, a senior in mechanical engineering and a four-year ISU Lunabotics Club member.

When the club formed six years ago, there were nine members. Its growth to more than 40 members this year is a good sign for the push in the US to get more young people interested in STEM subjects. This is one reason Vermeer sponsors the club with financial and technical support. The Pella, Iowa-based manufacturer of agricultural, mining and construction equipment, including the Vermeer Terrain Leveler^® surface excavation machine (SEM) for the surface mining industry, wants to support STEM initiatives and keep up on student ideas related to technology.

Another benefit is it keeps Vermeer employees engaged and sparks innovative thinking, according to Doug Hundt, the company’s President of Industrial Solutions. It also gives Vermeer exposure to bright engineering students just an hour’s drive from its headquarters. “Being involved with the ISU Lunabotics Club is definitely a great way to identify talent and show them that there are great opportunities right here in Iowa,” Hundt says.

NASA also has a practical interest in hosting a robotics competition. The space agency would like to establish a human presence on Mars, and mining would be important for that. Martian soil, which is fine regolith, contains ice. Mining would be required to access the ice for its use as water to support life and as a propellant. “The technology concepts developed by the university teams for this competition conceivably could be used to mine resources on extraterrestrial bodies including Mars,” NASA says on its website. “NASA will directly benefit from the competition by encouraging the development of innovative planetary regolith excavation concepts from universities, which may result in clever ideas and solutions that could be applied to an actual excavation device or payload.”

In other words, the work done by these university students very well could be part of future space missions. About 50 teams will compete in the contest. Their robots will be tasked with traversing a simulated Martian terrain that includes obstacles, excavating regolith and depositing the material into a collector bin within 10 minutes.

The competition also takes into account the extreme conditions found on Mars. For example, teams can earn points for autonomous operations, dust-tolerant designs and passing a safety inspection and a communication check. They lose points for each kilogram the mining robot weighs and for each watt-hour of energy it consumes.

This year’s robot by the ISU Lunabotics Club is made primarily from aluminum, including its frame, hopper and digger buckets. It also contains plastics, high-density polyethylene, brass and other materials. It is 2 ft 5.5 inches (0.75 m) wide and high, and 3 ft 7.33 inches (1.1 m) long. The width and height are the maximum allowed by the rules, and the length is what ISU has found works best for them concerning the machine’s center of gravity. The robot’s name is HERMES III, being the third version of previous models. Hermes is the Greek god of boundaries and transitions, and a messenger of the gods. Heise also turned it into an acronym, high-efficiency regolith mining excavation system.

Similar to previous ISU rovers, it has a bucket ladder system to collect material. A change this year is it has two staggered buckets instead of one long bucket. The team expects that to reduce digger oscillation and to expand the digging profile so the rover can excavate more material more quickly. It costs the ISU team between $5,000 and $9,000 to build one robot for the competition, and that’s with recycling parts from previous models and in-kind donations. But Heise says that if the countless hours of labour by the students is included, the true cost would be $100,000 to $150,000.

ISU has had great success in past competitions. The school took first place in the on-site mining award in 2012 and 2013, won the grand prize in 2013, and in 2014 became the first team in the event’s history to complete a fully autonomous 10-minute run. Autonomy is of great interest not only to NASA but also the mining industry, and achieving it was a special moment for the club.

This year, NASA says autonomous robots cannot touch the walls of the arena, something that in the past helped a rover establish its location. In response, the ISU Lunabotics Club plans to use triangulation with lasers and radio frequency identification, or RFID. Heise notes there are similarities and differences between mining equipment developed for use on Earth and what NASA would be interested in for use on other celestial bodies. Key differences include the conditions the space vehicles would work in, such as gravity of various strengths, extreme radiation and extreme temperatures.

“Many of the materials we take for granted to use here on Earth would be rendered useless in minutes or hours in space,” Heise says. On the other hand, both pieces of equipment would be charged with collecting materials for the purpose of creating value for mankind. “Many of the technologies applied by NASA competition teams can be easily developed into the next generation of space and earthbound high-efficiency autonomous vehicles,” Heise says.