Series: Astromech Droids
Why doesn’t R2-D2 exist? Building a helper droid that can talk to any machine, and what the attempt reveals: lost modular design, vendor lock-in, and the case for infrastructure that robots and people can both maintain.
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Teaching an Old Droid New Tricks: Why I’m Building an R2-D2 inspired ‘droid
Or: How Star Wars Reveals Everything Wrong With Modern Technology Part 1 of a series on astromech droids, universal design, and the technologies we’ve lost and/or failed to develop. I’m sitting in my workshop come sitting room with an NVIDIA…
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The Death of the Helper Droid: How Modular Design Philosophy Gave Way to Vendor Lock-in
A History of Lost Technologies and Changed Incentives Part 2 of the R2 Astromech Project series In the first post, I explained why I’m building an R2-D2 style helper droid—a universal translator for machines that can diagnose infrastructure, speak multiple…
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Universal Maintenance Design: Making Infrastructure R2-Accessible
How Designing for Robots Creates Better Systems for Everyone Part 3 of the R2 Astromech Project series In the previous posts, I explained why we need helper droids and traced how we lost the modular design philosophy that would have…