What animal is this?
Sea cow
What is a manatee?
This sensor is commonly used to measure wheel rotation in mobile robots.
What is an encoder?
O M G. I am living in heaven
Who is Samuel
This standard library container stores elements in a contiguous block of memory.
What is std::vector?
The thing holding your system together at 2 a.m.
What is hope?
Business goose
What is a penguin?
This transmission provides zero backlash and high torque density but limited shock tolerance.
What is a harmonic drive?
dinasours
Who is Mike?
This algorithm fuses noisy measurements and predictions under Gaussian assumptions.
What is a Kalman filter?
The thing that makes a bug reproducible.
What is telling someone you fixed it?
Murder log
What is a crocodile?
This motor moves in discrete steps and is often used in CNC machines.
What is a stepper motor?
You are a brave person
Who is Patrick
This C++ rule defines when it is necessary to explicitly declare copy/move constructors and destructors.
What is the Rule of Five?
The thing that decides whether the robot works today.
What is the demo gods?
Forbidden marshmallow
What is a polar bear?
This condition causes rolling elements to indent bearing races under static load.
What is brinelling?
Luckily it seems they don’t bite or suck blood.
Who is Thomas
This C++ behavior results from accessing memory after it has been freed.
What is use-after-free?
The only scalable solution to unreliable hardware.
What is duct tape?
Anxiety chicken
What is a chihuahua?
This failure mode occurs when a motor draws excessive current while stalled, often destroying drivers.
What is thermal overload (or stall current damage)?
This tradeoff improves planning optimality but dramatically increases computation time in high-dimensional spaces.
What is increasing the dimensionality of the configuration space (or optimizing for global optimality)?
The only thing more fragile than a robotic system.
What is the demo?