7 min readSommay Khanna
Designing a rescue robot around constraints, not features
Power budget, radio range and payload weight decide the architecture. The feature list comes afterwards.
- Robotics
- Engineering
It is tempting to start a rescue robot from the capability list: thermal sensing, life detection, GPS, delivery. Start there and you end up with a machine that cannot carry its own battery.
The honest starting point is a set of hard limits. How long must the platform run on one charge? How far does the radio need to reach through concrete? How much mass can the drone lift and still stay in the air long enough to be useful?
Every one of those constraints removes options, and what is left is the design. That is why the ground robot and the drone are separate: finding people and reaching them have almost nothing in common as engineering problems, and forcing them onto one platform makes both worse.
More writing
6 min read
Building LLM automation that does not quietly break
A model that is right 90% of the time is not 90% useful if you cannot tell which 10% went wrong.
- AI
- Automation
5 min read
What a line-following robot actually teaches you
The sensor array is the easy part. Everything interesting happens in the tuning — and in what breaks when the track surface changes.
- Robotics
- Competition