Northern Irish Students Build a Robot Designed for the Moon

A team of university students from Northern Ireland is preparing to take a home-built lunar robot to the United States for an international NASA competition.

The 10 students from Queen’s University Belfast will travel to Florida later this month to compete in NASA’s Lunabotics competition, where university teams develop and operate robots designed to perform tasks similar to those future machines could carry out on the Moon.

The Queen’s University team has already achieved success at a UK competition, where its robot won against other university teams. That victory earned the students an invitation to the international event at the University of Central Florida.

Their robot weighs about 52 kilograms and has an aluminium frame. The students divided the project into mechanical, electronics and software teams, with each group responsible for a different part of the machine.

The robot is designed to operate autonomously in a simulated lunar environment. It must navigate across obstacles, collect material designed to imitate lunar soil and transport it to another location.

The students have spent hundreds of hours preparing the robot for the competition. They have also created computer simulations to test how the rover’s software will work before putting the machine through its physical challenges.

For mechanical engineering PhD student Jack Fitzpatrick, the competition is an opportunity to demonstrate what the students have learned and to represent Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom on an international stage.

Electrical and electronic engineering student Jamie Smith leads the software side of the project. His team has worked on controlling the rover and developing autonomous capabilities that allow it to determine where it is and complete tasks with limited human intervention.

The competition is designed around a bigger idea: future lunar robots could help prepare environments for astronauts by moving soil, building structures and carrying out difficult tasks before humans arrive.

For the students, however, the immediate challenge is much closer to home. They must transport their robot to Florida, compete against teams from the United States, Australia and India, and see how their design performs against some of the strongest university teams in the competition.

Even if they do not win, the students say the experience will give them a foundation for improving the robot in future competitions.

What started as a university engineering project has now become an international opportunity — giving a group of young engineers the chance to test their ideas on a stage inspired by humanity’s future beyond Earth.

Source: BBC News, October 4, 2026.