NASA Robotic Mining Competition
NASA's Robotic Mining Competition (RMC) is an annual design challenge competition where approximately 60 universities from across the country design and build autonomous rovers capable of mining regolith and then constructing a regolith-based berm on Lunar terrain to carry out Artemis Mission-related tasks such as providing protection from blast and ejecta during lunar landings. This competition is of particular importance to NASA; as the Artemis program advances, it will be crucial to deploy rovers that can assist in tasks that will allow humans to reside on the Moon and determine future manned missions to Mars.
In addition to creating a rover from scratch, teams are required to submit a systems engineering paper to detail their design approach and philosophy as well as an outreach paper to detail their K-12 outreach. Exceptionally innovative designs may be implemented to a NASA excavation device to travel to the Moon, Mars, or other celestial locations. Each year, NASA modifies the rules of the competition to increasingly accurately represent the challenges true rover designs would face, as well as to encourage continuous active development on the part of the University teams.
