Back in 1985, before the Internet fully kicked in, my BBS group started hashing out plans for chassis designs and a common-bus operating system language that would allow the OS and peripheral sensors to make joint decisions. I had just gotten rid of my Commodore 64, and the key feature of their success was intelligent peripherals. I thought that was a fine starting point for something my team thought we ought to show to NASA for the Mars Lander.
I gained the experience of designing mechanical systems and putting together token exchange command and control languages from that, although we never met our goal of boxing it up and running up to Ames. My team was global - Australia to the Netherlands. Most of the parts are gone, and the notes were on 5.25" floppy. They all went out with the trash 10 years ago (me not realizing the research went too). But, I have the robot bug, and the rest of the development skill.