🚀 go-pugleaf

Actually, as one of the people who was offered an opportunity to work
on the Erebus project ( I turned it down for personal reasons ) I
think I can offer more insight into the "failure" of the Dante
explorer robot.  

Due to what I see as political and organizational reasons, 
the project was supposed to proceed from start to finish in
one year.  Once the negotiation and contract signing stuff was taken
care of, that time line had been shrunk to just ten months.  Ten
months to take a VERY complex problem through all phases from design
to actual mission operation.  That's a hell of a short time even for
the fine folks at the FRC who are used to difficult deadlines.

One of the simplifing decisions that was made to help meet the
schedule was to exclude any forms of redundancy in the system that
would cope in the event of any single point failures such as the
fiber optic link failure that resulted in the mission being scrubbed.

In retrospect this may have been a "bad" decision but it seems that
without it there would have been no way to complete any portion of
the project in the time allotted.  In a real mission there would
almost certainly be a more generous time/money budget and a
careful evaluation of the possible single point failure modes would
have been made.  Ample redundancy would be designed into all mission
critical systems that would allow operation to continue under a
variety of failure scenarios.  

Overall, I think the Erebus project was a qualified success, in
that it must have been one of the most rapid development 
projects ever to have met with even partial success in 
such a hostile environment. Not just the final mission environment but
the pressured environment under which the development project was
carried out.

Hopefully, they will get another shot at it next "summer" with 
a machine that has had the advantage of an additional
year of unhurried development.  

My hat is off to the Erebus team who came through under intense
pressure ( and temperature 8^) ).
Cb