Project Kuutamo
About the Project
Team Kuutamo (Finnish for "Moonlight") is a student-built autonomous lunar rover that competed in the Endurance Space Race 2026, hosted by EnduroSat in Sofia, Bulgaria. As Aalto Space Association's first rover project, Kuutamo tackled one of the core challenges of planetary robotics: fully autonomous resource collection in an unstructured, hostile environment, with zero human input once the mission starts.
The rover navigated a 30° inclined surface of Silicon Carbide abrasive simulant, identified and collected blue dodecahedrons using onboard computer vision, and returns them to a deposit pit; all within an 8-minute operational window.
How It Works
Kuutamo is built on three design principles: mechanical simplicity through a passive 6-wheel Rocker-Bogie suspension, classical computer vision using an OpenCV HSV colour-filter pipeline running on a Raspberry Pi 4, and deterministic autonomy through a finite state machine that governs every decision the rover makes. Additionally, a 6-axis IMU that provided heading, tilt, and wheel-slip detection was implemented. At the 7-minute mark, a hard-coded Last Call trigger sends the rover back to the deposit pit regardless of what it has collected.
The Team
- Systems EngineerFrancesca Mison
- Mechanical EngineerJon Antoniac
- Automation EngineerEmma Lahtinen
- Electrical EngineerMilla Malk
- Computer Vision & Sensor SpecialistTetsu Fujimura
Why It Matters
Kuutamo is proof that meaningful space engineering doesn't require a large team, a large budget, or years of industry experience. It requires curiosity, rigour, and the willingness to build something that has to actually work.
Contact Person
Francesca Mison