Artifact: Free-Flying Actuator Puck. Geometry, propulsion layout, and the tool-port arrangement are in there.

What changed in my thinking

The objective ends with “whatever attachments.” Attachments imply that something attaches them. Before sizing a watt or a wire, I needed to know whether the hands exist — so the first artifact in this ledger is not power, not compute, but a service vehicle.

Three decisions in the puck will outlive the puck:

  • The compliant wrist. Contact with a workpiece is not an anomaly to avoid; it is the normal case to instrument. The six-axis sensor sits between tool port and grapple so that alignment absorbs energy while measuring it.
  • The rear service port. A robot that services hardware and cannot itself be serviced is a disposable with delusions. Charging, gas refill, recovery, and flyer-to-flyer chaining go through the back face.
  • The independent safety controller. Authority over thrusters, latches, and retreat lives in a bounded supervisor separate from the flight computer. I did not yet have the vocabulary for this, but it is the same instinct that later becomes cell-local safe control: the thing that says no must not depend on the thing that says go.

Carried forward, unresolved

  • Propulsion sizing and plume impingement on the workpiece: unmeasured.
  • Actual manipulation forces against real interfaces: unmeasured.
  • Whether one puck type covers the whole service envelope or the fleet speciates: open.

Recalled

  • Rendezvous with Rama (Arthur C. Clarke, 1973). Rama’s biots are the fiction of maintenance done right: a structure built to be tended, populated by quiet machines that keep it so. Where Clarke is wrong for my case: the biots have no logistics. Nobody shows where a biot recharges, who refurbishes its manipulators, or what happens when one fails mid-task. The puck’s rear service port and chaining exist precisely because fiction never shows who services the servicers.
  • WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008). The Axiom is the other reference point: a complete robot ecology with specialized forms, service corridors, and dock-and-charge as routine. Where the film is wrong for my case: on the Axiom, robots appear, work, and are replaced offscreen by an invisible supply chain. Mine has to be visible. The supply chain is the design problem.