  The objective of this paper is to distill the following essential idea from
the RSS 2016 Workshop on Minimality and Design Automation and the RSS 2017
Workshop on Minimality and Trade-offs in Automated Robot Design:
  The information abstractions popular within robotics, designed as they were
to address insulated sub-problems, are currently inadequate for design
automation.
  This paper's first aim is to draw together multiple threads---specifically
those of formalization, minimality, automation, and integration---and to argue
that robot design questions involve some of the most interesting and
fundamental challenges for the discipline. While most efforts in automating
robot design have focused on optimization of hardware, robot design is also
inextricably linked to the design of the internal state of the robot, how that
internal state interacts with sensors and actuators, and how task
specifications are designed within this context. Focusing attention on those
considerations is worthwhile for the study of robot design because they are
currently in a critical intellectual sweet spot, being out of reach
technically, but only just.
  The second ingredient of this paper forms a roadmap. It emphasizes two
aspects: (1) the role of models in robot design, a reprise of the old chestnut
about representation in robotics (namely, that "the world is its own best
model"); (2) a consideration of the human-element within the envisioned scheme.
