By
SDSU Robotics Club
South Dakota State University
Each year, the SDSU Robotics Club has kept growing and innovating. We started as a hobby group and have evolved to become the largest and fastest growing engineering club on the SDSU campus. This year we are raising $2,000 to compete in two of the largest college robotics competitions in the nation: NASA's Lunabotics Robotic Mining Challenge and the Autonomous Snowplow Competition. We are excited to keep designing, building, and testing, however we cannot do that without your help! Help us mine on the moon and plow the snow!
The SDSU Robotics Club started out as a senior design project group and morphed into a hobbyist club for college students who loved robotics. Over the past three years, the club has grown to be a nationally competitive team. The club received national recognition by winning the Land O’Lakes Bot Shot competition in 2019. After going toe to toe with some of the top engineering universities in the country and coming out on top, we knew we were ready for a bigger challenge. Last year, we decided to shoot for the moon and got accepted to compete in the NASA Lunabotics Robotic Mining Challenge. Due to COVID-19 that competition was cancelled, but we're back at it again this year! Alongside that competition, we decided to start another: the Autonomous Snowplow Competition, which will be held in January 2022! We are a group of more than eighty students, split between two competitions, working together to design and build robots of the future!
The NASA Lunabotics Competition team is once again aiming for the moon! This national competition is held at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. We are designing and building a fully autonomous robot that will traverse rough lunar terrain, dig through a layer of icy regolith, mine gravel under the regolith, and deliver the gravel to a collection bin for points. This weeklong competition pits us against the best engineering schools in the country, where we hope to add to our championship winning record!
In our newest competition, the Autonomous Snowplow team will build a robot that will recognize and clear snow from a designated area - all without human guidance. They will compete next January at Dunwoody College in Minneapolis. The team has been hard at work for months designing, planning, and building their bot. They will compete against the top engineering colleges in a competition with real-world impact!
This year has proven especially difficult for our community outreach programs, but that hasn’t stopped us! Battle Rabbits, our newest outreach project, is a BattleBots® style competition for high school teams. The high school students program the self-driving robots and send them back to the Robotics Club for the competition. Teams will compete against each other in destructive winner-takes-all matches. The teams will be guided and taught by members of the Robotics Club. The competition will be held live on YouTube for anyone to enjoy!
Facebook: SDSU Robotics Club
Twitter: @sdsurobotics
Instagram: @sdstaterobotics
Snapchat: sdrobotics2009
YouTube: SDState Robotics Club
We post regular updates about the club and robots! Check us out on social media and share our story!
Whether donating to the club or simply sharing our story, you help lead our club to victory! Make sure to tell your friends and family about our mission: to build robots of the future. Join the SDSU Robotics community and help us clear the roads and shoot for the moon!
Select this reward if you just want to donate to the project without receiving a reward.
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Nuts and Bolts: Small, but very important pieces in the grand scheme of things! Your donation helps us fit everything together!
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3D Printer Filament: We use 3D Printing for both prototyping and custom-made parts. Help us print and test our parts in-house!
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Wheels: Having two robots means we'll need eight wheels! Push our robots to success by allowing us the mobility to get ahead of the competition!
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Motors: Every moving part, from our drivetrain to our mining arm, is powered by motors! Your donation allows a belt, sensor, chain, or bucket move like it’s supposed to!
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Linear Actuator: Our robot has a fixed starting size, but that doesn't mean we have to stay that way! Linear actuators push our robot beyond it's starting limits. Your donation allows us to expand to new challenges as we learn and grow!
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Battery: We can't run a power cable to the moon, so our robots will need state-of-the-art batteries! Just like batteries are the powerhouse of the robot, you can be the powerhouse behind our team!
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Sensor: An array of sensors tell each robot where it’s located, where obstacles are, and what direction it’s facing. Tell our teams that we’re heading in the direction of success!
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Computer: The brains behind the operation! Each robot has its own computer to process information and make decisions. Help us build some smart robots!
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