Thanks to Ken Davidian, manager of the NASA Centennial Challenges program, for posting the video and also to Ray @ Space Prizes for sharing the links.
By now, you know that no one won the Regolith Excavation Challenge. But you haven't heard what Joel had to say about that competition day, have you? Read on.
Nobody won the competition or even got close to the minimum requirement. Our robot dug itself into the sand box because they put a slope in the sand. We adjusted the bungy cords to provide just the right amount of negative resistance to not get mashed on the sand but the slope liifted the excavator up an little, taking away the affect of the bungy cords and caused it to dig in.They asked us if we wanted a second attempt to show a proof of concept, so we replaced the power source since getting dug in made us draw more than 18 amps of juice and smoked it. We would of been good except the current sensor broke one of the small leads on a surface mount chip. So with the new power source and adjustment we fired up old red (lol) and she began to turn that sand into baking powder (lol).
We scooped 4.4Kg in for 40 seconds. We were the only ones to move the simulant at the right speed to blow by the requirement. Everybody was clapping and excited but it couldn't be counted. The judges came up to us and said they liked ours the best. They also said we were real inventors, since they had never seen anything like ours and if it wasn't for the bungy cord or the slope we would be walking away with $120K.
Buzz Aldren came up to the robot and asked how it worked and we showed it to him and did the run through like 50 times before. I also got my picture taken with him from a guy from Launch magazine, so I'm famous now (lol).
Everybody asked if we were coming back next year and we told them most definately. We made a machine to go beyond what was required but for an unfortunate circumstance we would have won.
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