🚀 go-pugleaf

Kerien Fitzpatrick of CMU sez:
> Those of us at the FRC knew this project was extremely risky

Frankly, I don't think the lesson here has anything to do with small vs. large.
I think it has to to with two things: (1) funding realities and (2) reliability/
redundancy.

CMU took on this project knowing that it was risky and that they
had little time and money to make it work. That they accomplished what they
did with those limitations is, I think, quite impressive. However, the negative
publicity for CMU and especially NASA was a big risk; putting themselves on
TV for everyone to see their failure was worse, and then NASA claiming it as
an unqualified success topped it off. That was enough to get a very negative
editorial on the local paper. I think the political/funding lesson is that if
you've got high risk, little time, and little money, don't take it! If you must,
then hope no one notices :-)

The technical lesson is not big vs. small. It is reliability/redundancy. The
CMU folks say they knew they did not have adequate redundancy, and we can all
see that now. Let it be an example to be cited when asking for redundancy in
a system. If you want to get redundancy with small robots, that's fine if they
can do the job.

Nuf said.

-- 
Alex L. Bangs ---> bangsal@ornl.gov         Of course, my opinions are
Oak Ridge National Laboratory/CESAR            my own darned business...
Autonomous Robotic Systems Group