Gomboc Engineering: Designing Self-Righting Autonomous Systems

Proposes gomboc engineering, a design discipline for autonomous systems that self-right through incentive or feedback geometry alone, without human intervention. Defines five formal properties, a diagnostic framework (the Gomboc Test), and a named failure mode (gomboc erosion). Draws on the mathematical gomboc (Domokos and Varkonyi, 2006) and illustrates the framework across manufacturing process design, decentralized protocol architecture, and conservation mechanism design.