Congratulations to the selected teams and their schools who will participate in the Lunar Autonomy Challenge! 31 teams were selected for the qualifying round, engaging 229 students from colleges and universities in 15 states. Teams will now move on to a Qualifying Round where they will virtually explore and map the lunar surface using a digital twin of NASA’s lunar mobility robot, the ISRU Pilot Excavator (IPEx). Teams will develop software that can perform set actions without human intervention, navigating the digital IPEx in the harsh, low-light conditions of the Moon. The Qualifying Round will extend to February 28, when the top-scoring teams will proceed to the Final Round, with the winners announced in May 2025.
The Lunar Autonomy Challenge is a collaboration between NASA, The Johns Hopkins University (JHU) Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), Caterpillar Inc., and Embodied AI.
Learn more: https://lunar-autonomy-challenge.jhuapl.edu/
| School | City | State |
| American Public University System | Charles Town | West Virginia |
| Arizona State University | Tempe | Arizona |
| California Polytechnic Institute, Pomona (1) | Pomona | California |
| California Polytechnic Institute, Pomona (2) | Pomona | California |
| Carnegie Mellon University | Pittsburgh | Pennsylvania |
| Embry Riddle Aeronautical University | Daytona Beach | Florida |
| Essex County College | Newark | New Jersey |
| Georgia Institute of Technology & Arizona State University | Atlanta & Tempe | Georgia & Arizona |
| Harvard University | Allston | Massachusetts |
| Johns Hopkins University Whiting School of Engineering | Baltimore | Maryland |
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology | Cambridge | Massachusetts |
| New York University Tandon School of Engineering | Brooklyn | New York |
| North Carolina State University | Raleigh | North Carolina |
| Penn State (1) | University Park | Pennsylvania |
| Penn State (2) | University Park | Pennsylvania |
| Purdue University | West Lafayette | Indiana |
| Rochester Institute of Technology | Rochester | New York |
| Rose Hulman Institue of Technology | Terre Haute | Indiana |
| Stanford University | Stanford | California |
| Texas A&M University | College Station | Texas |
| University of Alabama | Tuscaloosa | Alabama |
| University of Buffalo, State University of New York | Buffalo | New York |
| University of California, Stanislaus | Turlock | California |
| University of Illinois Urbana Champaign (1) | Urbana | Illinois |
| University of Illinois Urbana Champaign (2) | Urbana | Illinois |
| University of Maryland | College Park | Maryland |
| University of Pennsylvania (1) | Philadelphia | Pennsylvania |
| University of Pennsylvania (2) | Philadelphia | Pennsylvania |
| University of Southern California & Stanford University | Los Angeles & Stanford | California |
| West Virginia University | Morgantown | West Virginia |
| Worcester Polytechnic Institute | Worcester | Massachusetts |
