Alabama Astrobotics are six time champions of NASA's Robotic Mining Competition - The best in robotics mining!

The final frontier of mining.....space..

If you are looking to join the University of Alabama, have interest in robotics and passionate about digging space treasure, check out the Alabama Astrobotics Club.

They are a robotics team that compete every year in the NASA’s Robotic Mining Competition (RMC) at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral.

Sort of side note......

What is RMC?

RMC is a university level robotics mining competition hosted by NASA with a goal of having universities develop extraterrestrial mining concepts and solutions that can be implemented future excavations in space.

The latest season (2019-2020) name is changed to Lunabotics Engineering Competition. More info here.

DARPA is hosting the bigger brother of mining competitions called the DARPA Subterranean Challenge.

Now a short message from our robot sponsors....

Micro Bot

Monster Bot

 Colossus Bot

Thank you and back to regular programming with Alabama Astrobotics...

Competing is one thing but this team has managed to achieve what many other schools have been trying for years. Alabama Astrobotics are six time champions (2012, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019) at the NASA Mining Competition. This is Godlike status when is comes to robotics mining among universities in the USA and around the world. There must be something in Alabama water. Perhaps space diamonds.

Alabama Astrobotics enjoy competing but they also are passionate about learning by providing outreach to the communities by providing robotics and STEM classes K-12 students looking to have STEM based careers.

Giving back to the community is very important and perhaps this is why they have been passionate and helpful enough to be champions and becoming a leader in robotics mining.

The Astrobotics Team has also partnered with Dynetics and received an investment in the future students of University of Alabama Engineering. A portion of the donation will go toward a new lab facility just behind Hardway Hall. In addition, the team will also use the funds to further expand their participation in robotics competitions and further strengthen their lead as the robotics mining kings.

The team adviser is bad ass professor Kenneth Ricks. He basically runs the place and has been doing a very good job with all those wins. Some people say he is "old" and "mean" but usually that means "old" and "wise".

The adviser is not the only important part of the team. As we all know, the team members are crucial and we can see that their good attitude reflects on their outstanding performance in these competitions.

Meet Max Eastepp. He looks young but he was the team lead for the 2018-2019 competition. He was a senior at the time and according to him, everybody is a genius but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid. Very wise words.

They also have Kelvin So which is the Mechanical Lead and Safety Co-Lead. According to him, you can shake the earth in a gentle way.

We at Automation & Robotics are very impressed with the leaders and most importantly other 40 team members and hope Alabama Astrobotics continue to push boundaries and inspire other teams to dig harder!

 In case the miner needs to defend itself from aliens or unfriendly organisms, perhaps a slight modification is required.

 More about space mining...NASA and Caterpillar team up to mine asteroids.

Check out NASA's RASSOR space digging robot.

 And of course, we all remember Armageddon's Armadillo.

Best of luck to Alabama Astrobotics and thank you for having such an inspiring team.

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