[WIP]Lunar Autonomy Challenge

In the fall of 2024, I decided to compete in the Lunar Autonomy Challenge, which was a competition sponsored by NASA, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Catterpillar, and others. I wanted to commit to this challenge in order to learn more about autonomy in exploratory robotics. I had some background in AI, game development, and computer vision, so it seemed like the perfect learning opportunity. Over the next year, I learned about so many areas of science and engineering I previously wasn’t privy too. I’m so grateful I had this experience to learn about localization, navigation, and path planning topics. I ended up not being able to submit anything for the actual qualification round, but decided to keep exploring the topic to produce a working solution. Along the way, I also made the decision to use this work for my thesis topic. I did end up with a fully autonomous solution, and it was incredibly rewarding to simply complete a project and connect many different systems together into a single rover agent.

Below is a photo dump of pictures I collected relating to my work. Please enjoy while I work on documenting everything. Also check out these related videos:

Video 1 Video 2 Video 3 Video 4