joflasher | the sweet slither of success

I can now say I've been part of a successful proposal writing team. This isn't no little IR&D either, its a BIG project with multiple teams and all sorts of cool acronyms.

The military is once again looking at high degree of freedom, autonomous mobile robots, otherwise known as snake robots. As one of the few people at Draper with hands on experience in SRs and with my background in control theory, I was asked to do a decent part of our proposal. Most of what I wrote addressed the control problems of a hyper-redundant non-linear system. I also did a bit about reflex vs. planned reactions to stimulus. All in all, I did about 10 pages of "stuff". I just found out this morning it got funded. One of the co-writers stopped in to tell me but he said it wasn't 100% official yet. Just now, the division leader stopped in to offer his congrats, so I'm pretty sure we're good to go now.

Who'd have thought I'd be doing snake robots again 6 years after leaving Howie's lab. Guess I should fire an email off to rak and let him know he's missing out.