The Community College of Aurora (CCA) Space Grant Robotics team recently journeyed to Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve near Alamosa, Colorado, to compete in the prestigious Colorado Space Grant Consortium (COSGC) Robotics Challenge.
The Challenge is supported by the Colorado Space Grant, which is managed out of CU Boulder by the Colorado Space Grant Consortium (COSGC). CU Boulder is the home institution for COSGC, but under its umbrella are 20 other affiliate institutions within Colorado (including two-year and four-year colleges/universities) that are granted sub-awards. CCA is one of these 20 affiliates.
The event aims to inspire the next generation of aerospace innovators. For the CCA Robotics team, it was more than just a competition—it was a step closer to careers in STEM fields, driven by curiosity, creativity, and collaboration. This annual event draws college teams from across the state to test their engineering skills in a uniquely rugged environment. Tasked with designing autonomous operated vehicles capable of navigating the park’s diverse terrain, CCA’s team showcased their months of hard work, innovation, and teamwork.
The team decided early this academic year to aim for a particular category in which to excel and design a very unique and challenging dunes-roving robot. This build started from scratch, with no kits or templates. They initiated their design journey with the common practice in robotics of biomimicry—copying the innovations already found in the living world. Their inspiration focused on the locomotion of a seal on land, so they named their bot the Land Seal, and their team was born—Seal Team 120.
“Despite the fact that the fully autonomous Land Seal did encounter numerous difficulties navigating much of the terrain, it did succeed more than anticipated in simply traversing the challenging terrain and gathered a huge amount of spectators who were quite intrigued at this odd little bot flopping across the sand,” explained Tom Dillon, Biology faculty member and COSGC affiliate director. “At the outset, our students wanted to find a new and innovative way to traverse the dunes landscape, and they succeeded so much so that they were recognized with the award for the Most Creative Mode of Locomotion in a field of nearly twenty bots, up against community college and university teams alike. They even wowed the judges enough to eclipse the six-legged insect-o-bot for this award category.”
This year, the CCA-COSGC “Space Grant” funded two teams overall: the COSGC Robotics Challenge team and the National Plant the Moon Challenge (PTMC) team. This second team consisted of another five students. It is the Earth Team—a biology-based ecology research sector of the grant that gives life science-interested students a more focused opportunity within the Space Grant, with less of the engineering focus of the robotics and DemoSat challenges. Rhonda Hattar, Biology faculty, acts as the primary investigator (PI), leading these research teams. This PTMC team was nationally recognized for their project achievements.
Both of these teams presented their scientific and engineering achievements at the COSGC Undergraduate Research Symposium on April 26 at Pikes Peak State College.
Dillon added that these projects are extracurricular and outside the bounds of any course syllabus. “This gives us the latitude to create open-ended opportunities for students to go through real and legitimate scientific research and engineering build process experiences. From failure to finish line, students live through the full gamut of the trials and tribulations, disappointments and elations that are the life of a professional scientist/engineer. The projects oftentimes start from scratch, but sometimes build off previous student projects, and all require students to learn essential skills for educational, workplace, and life success such as project design, technical building and techniques, experimental design, data collection and analysis, iterative problem solving and troubleshooting, and productive team dynamics.”
For future projects, Hattar intends to continue Earth Team’s involvement in PTMC, and Dillon will provide incoming students with more opportunities in robotics, high-altitude balloon flight research, or wherever else their imaginations wish to take them within the realm of NASA science—and within a defined budget.