Designing a complex electronic device like a delivery drone involves juggling many choices, such as selecting motors and batteries that minimize cost while maximizing the payload the drone can carry or the distance it can travel. Unraveling that conundrum is no easy task, but what happens if the designers don't know the exact specifications of each battery and motor' On top of that, the real-world performance of these components will likely be affected by unpredictable factors, like changing weather along the drone's route. MIT researchers developed a new framework that helps engineers design complex systems in a way that explicitly accounts for such uncertainty. The framework allows them to model the performance tradeoffs of a device with many interconnected parts, each of which could behave in unpredictable ways. Their technique captures the likelihood of many outcomes and tradeoffs, giving designers more information than many existing approaches which, at most, can usually only...
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