Undergraduates Attend ARLISS Competition

During the week of September 10, 2018, three undergraduate students attended the 20th Annual ARLISS competition on the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. ARLISS, an acronym for A Rocket Launch for International Student Satellites, is an international competition in which teams of students design and build robots to accomplish missions analogous to those needed for planetary exploration. This was the fifth time that a team from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at University of Louisiana at Lafayette has attended the contest.

The 2018 UL Lafayette team, comprised of Grant Baudoin, Matthew Fanguy, and Kyle Leleux and advised by Dr. Vaughan, completed the comeback mission. For this mission, the teams' robots must autonomously navigate to a predetermined target on the desert after being launched to an altitude of approximately 14,000 feet. The rockets that launch the robots are provided by the AEROPAC rocket club. The rocket payload bay into which the student-built robots must fit is approximately six-inches in diameter and almost ten-inches deep. Due to high winds on the launch day, the UL Lafayette entry landed over three miles away from the target location. However, the device did land safely and was able to travel a short distance before becoming stuck on the desert. Pictures from the contest can be found in the flickr album for the project.

Funding for the UL Lafayette team was provided by a Louisiana Space Grant Consortium (LaSPACE) grant. We are grateful for their support of this project.