The Astronauts Memorial Foundation is proud to announce the successful conclusion of NASA’s 2025 Lunabotics Challenge, hosted at The Center for Space Education at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.
This year’s Lunabotics Challenge featured the top 10 highest-performing teams from the national field of 38 competitors, as well as a special demonstration team from Australia, adding an international layer of collaboration and innovation to the event. These elite teams were selected based on their engineering design reviews and project documentation leading up to the on-site challenge at Kennedy Space Center.
Support from AMF staff was instrumental in the event’s success. Ron Snyder, Delmer Southall, Carla Rosenberg, Julia Barney, and Colleen Middlebrooks all played key roles in ensuring smooth daily operations, from logistics, catering coodination and guest services while Chris Albritton severd as Technical Director for the Event and this years live broadcast which reached over 9,000 viewers across the three days of programming—an outstanding milestone in AMF’s commitment to education, outreach, and national visibility.
And the winner is… the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
The Utah Student Robotics Club claimed the prestigious Artemis Award, the grand prize of the challenge, on May 22. “Win was our motto for the whole year,” said Brycen Chaney, president of student robotics at the University of Utah. “We had a mission objective to take our team and competition a step further, but win was right up front of our minds.”
Lunabotics is an annual NASA challenge where university students design and build autonomous and remote-controlled robots capable of excavating and transporting simulated lunar regolith—the loose, fragmented material on the Moon’s surface—and constructing berms in a simulated lunar environment. This year's competition was held in the Artemis Arena, designed to replicate the engineering challenges of the Moon’s surface.
Robert Mueller, senior technologist at NASA Kennedy and lead judge for the competition, noted, “During the 16th annual Lunabotics University Challenge, the teams continued to raise the bar on excavating, transporting, and depositing lunar regolith simulant with clever remotely controlled robots. New designs were revealed, and each team had a unique design and operations approach.”
In addition to the Artemis Award, other teams received recognition for their innovation and collaboration:
The University of Illinois Chicago earned first place for the Robotic Construction Award. “It’s a total team effort that made this work,” said Elijah Wilkinson, senior and team captain.
The University of Utah also took second place in the berm-building category.
The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa came in third place.
These accolades reflect not only technical achievement, but the dedication and teamwork exemplified throughout the competition.
This event continues to demonstrate AMF’s role as a key host and supporter of NASA-driven educational programs, while also honoring the legacy of fallen astronauts by inspiring the future of space exploration.
We thank our Board for their continued guidance and support in making events like these possible.
