Peter Kaminski

Rodney Brooks and Anita Flynn wrote in their classic 1989 paper “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System”:

Complex systems and complex missions take years of planning and force launches to become incredibly expensive. The longer the planning and the more expensive the mission, the more catastrophic if it fails. The solution has always been to plan better, add redundancy, test thoroughly and use high quality components. Based on our experience in building ground based mobile robots (legged and wheeled) we argue here for cheap, fast missions using large numbers of mass produced simple autonomous robots that are small by today’s standards (1 to 2 Kg). We argue that the time between mission conception and implementation can be radically reduced, that launch mass can be slashed, that totally autonomous robots can be more reliable than ground controlled robots, and that large numbers of robots can change the tradeoff between reliability of individual components and overall mission success. Lastly, we suggest that within a few years it will be possible at modest cost to invade a planet with millions of tiny robots.

With apologies to Brooks and Flynn (and acknowledgement that borrowing their snappy phrase has become trite (while also acknowledging it as one of the good design/organizational principles)), it’s time for me to start posting smaller, cheaper posts. I run across all sorts of interesting things in the course of my day when I’m online, and I ought to share them more.

So that’s my New Year’s resolution, two weeks early: don’t worry so much about polished posts; post more, even if posts are smaller, and post more often.

P.S.: I promise, however, not to flood any planet with millions of tiny posts. :-)

P.P.S: I was really going to post this December 1st, but procrastinated too much. I’m still two weeks early for New Year’s, though — yay for forward planning!

P.P.P.S: Robert, you know who you are, you owe me one — start blogging, already!!