A 2006 graduate of Littlefork-Big Falls High School returned to his alma mater earlier this month and brought a special guest with him.

Craig Kennedy showed off a robot he designed and built along with other members of the University of North Dakota Lunabotics team.

The team calls the robot a ‘lunabot’ and constructed it as part of NASA’s second annual Lunabotics Mining Competition held at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 

“Bringing the lunabot back to Littlefork was very fun,” the UND senior said.

The competition challenged teams to build a robot capable of mining as much regolith — which Kennedy said is basically soil — as possible in 15 minutes. The robots were required to be controlled wirelessly or be completely autonomous. The robot Kennedy and his team designed was controlled through a wireless setup using a game controller that many L-BF students probably have also used.

“One thing I’ve found out about the team’s outreach with students is that they are very impressed that we run it with an Xbox 360 controller,” Kennedy explained. “We chose the controller because it is relatively cheap and very intuitive to the user.”

To design the robot, Kennedy and his team had to follow size and weight constraints as required by NASA.

“We also were not allowed to use hydraulics or pneumatics as these things become very unreliable and are not feasible in a zero atmosphere environment like the one found on the moon,” he said.

The robot took the team about four months to design and four months to build. Kennedy’s role in the project was to design and assemble the electrical distribute and control of the robot.

At the competition, the UND team’s robot mined about 380 pounds of regolith to take second place behind Laurentian University, which is located in Greater Sudbury, Ontario. Kennedy said his team was awarded a cash prize and an invitation to see the launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis.

“Seeing the shuttle launch in July was a great experience,” Kennedy told The Journal.

Aside from taking second place at the Lunabotics Mining Competition, UND’s robot was one of the most reliable and most rugged of the competition, Kennedy noted. These qualities, combined with doing well on other paperwork and outreach requirements, earned the team the Joe Kosmo Award for Excellence. The prize for that award was a trip to Desert Research and Technology Studies in Arizona

“Our team got to see NASA's work on robots, similar in application as the one that our team designed,” Kennedy said. “We got to see NASA’s newest batch of space rovers that would be used to traverse the terrain of the moon, Mars, or a near-Earth asteroid.”

Kennedy said the visit to Littlefork was done as part of an outreach requirement of the competition.

“NASA requires that all of the teams go to schools promoting science, technology, engineering, and mathematics-related material,” he said.

Kennedy said he will graduate from UND in December with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. He said he plans to continue on to graduate school for his master’s degree.

“When I graduate, I would like to get into biomedical device engineering,” Kennedy said. “I do enjoy engineering and had engineering declared as my major as an incoming freshman in fall of 2006.”

Kennedy told L-BF students the entire experience got him better acquainted with NASA and engineering. He said he is glad he chose engineering for a career path.