Kentucky AstroRobotic Terrain Systems (KATS) Student Club

The prospect of journeying to the moon and mars captures the fascination of many students, especially some of those pursuing a career in engineering. Exploring new frontiers and being on the cutting edge of space exploration fascinates college level and younger students alike. The scientific and technological challenges involved in space related goals creates broad spectrums of opportunity to students of many disciplines. NASA has formulated many educational challenges giving the students ideas, motivation and goals to push technology to new limits. Students at the University of Kentucky have come together to explore these opportunities and develop a plan of action and involvement for the next and future years by creating a student club. Using NASA's Lunar Exploration Themes [1], the Mars Rover 2020 plan [2] and NASA's Mars Exploration Plan [3] as inspiration, club members will plan and facilitate competitions, workshops and fellowships. This includes building instructional robots for outreach events and demonstration purposes at the university as well as within middle and high schools around KY. The club will emphasize the importance of sound software and hardware design principles, while keeping the scale reasonable for incoming students. Utilizing NASA OpenMCT [4] software will provide a well defined interface for the display and monitoring of robot telemetry, while also scaling to more advanced applications. Students will consider sending a liaison to the 2019 IEEE SoutheastCon [5] in Huntsville, AL, which is themed around the moon exploration with the UK IEEE student branch. Other students will attend the NASA RMC 2019 [6] competition while some are planning to attend the RockOn workshop [7], in Colorado.