2027 Charlotte Lunabotics Competition

Ten UNC Charlotte engineering students. One robot. One shot at Kennedy Space Center.

We're Charlotte Lunabotics, and this year we're headed to NASA's 2026–2027 Lunabotics Challenge part of NASA's Artemis Student Challenge to do something wild: build a fully autonomous robot that can drive itself across brutal, crater-pocked simulated lunar terrain and construct a berm out of moon dust.

Why does that matter? Because when astronauts land back on the Moon, they'll need protection from blast debris during landing, from radiation, from the brutal thermal swings of deep space. Berms are that protection. NASA needs to know how to build them robotically, and they're trusting student teams like ours to help figure it out.

This year NASA shook things up after teams said the old two-week competition format was brutal on schedules and budgets, NASA trimmed it down. Same high bar, less grind. We're all in.

Here's where we're at:

• Preliminary Design Review — November 2026
• Team Selection Announced — December 2026
• Systems Engineering Paper & Robot Data Report — Spring 2027
• On-site finals at Kennedy Space Center — Spring 2027

We've got the drive. We need the fuel.

Every dollar goes straight into:

• Parts and hardware — the sensors, motors, and guts that turn a CAD file into a working robot
• Getting to Florida — flights, a place to sleep, and getting our robot there in one piece
• Testing it until it works — because "it worked in the lab" and "it worked in the arena" are two very different things

We're not asking you to fund a school project. We're asking you to help ten students go toe-to-toe with the best university teams in the country, on a challenge that's literally helping NASA plan how humans live on the Moon.

Chip in. Watch us launch.