Flexibility Envelope

December 9, 1968 Douglas Engelbart presented a demo of  NLS (which stood for oNLine System), which can be summarised as a word processing system and a web system all in one.
After a few introductory statements, his opening remarks were (starting at 2:16 in the video below):
“If you in your office, you as a intellectual worker, [...]

Here I list different conferences that can be interesting to attend if you which to learn more about SRCMR. The conferences are rarely devoted entirely to SRCMR but I only include them if they have some content from that field. When I can find central site for the type of conference I link to that [...]

Altough I do not think that I can ever come close to the two repositories of papers and links regarding SRCMR on the web one by Sam Slee and one by Neil Desmond, I maintain this list of the papers I have read and my notes on them. I add papers as I read them, [...]

Self-Reconfigurable Robots by Sam Slee is an incredible resource. It contains an incredible number of links to what must be every major paper, research institution and researcher in the field of SRCMR. It is simply amazing.
When reading it, I had a thrilling moment when I found my own blog listed! That was so cool since [...]

This is a interesting video by Howie Choset that shows a number of different gaits of modular snake robots.
It really shows how incredibly capable and different SRCMR solutions are going to be.
The video beautifully illustrates that solutions developed with SRCMR will be able to do many things, that old school products would struggle to do, [...]

I found this, in internet terms rather old video, but I think it is a really cool illustration of how things can work in the future. I especially like the part (starting at 35 seconds) where he creates a phone when he needs one just by doing the dialing motion!

It will be interesting to see, [...]

In writing this blog I use some words I have made up all by myself! I do that to summarise concepts and to make it easier to read and write. But I think it is best if I explain myself a bit. Especially since the confusion in the terminology in this area is significant, and [...]

In speaking about different groups of units, I have found it convenient to use the concept of a Set. I try to explain the different types of sets below.

Available User Set (AVS): Units available to one user, if the solutions and features currently using these units can be unimplemented, hence freeing them for use for [...]

Finally I have time to write a short note from Parallel Mechanisms and Manipulators 2008 (PMM) and IROS 2008.
I started off by attending the first day of PMM in lovely Montpellier, it was very interesting and I think that this kind of mechanisms will play a major role in SRCMR. They might even make up [...]

I think it is appropriate to devote an early post to what I named my blog after.
I got it from the Flight Envelope, which is a term used in aircraft development to illustrate how the aircraft can be flown with respect to air speed and altitude.
I use it to devide the world into two parts, outside and [...]