To actually answer your question, you need some kind of job scheduling service that manages the whole operation. Whether that’s SSM or Ansible or something else. With Ansible, you can set a parallel parameter that will say that you only update 3 or so at a time until they are all done. If one of those upgrades fails, then it will abort the process. There’s a parameter to make it die if any host fails, but I don’t recall it right now.

Yeah, I think this would be the right thing to do. Give them the physical parameters of the battery, but not the capacity. Let them innovate.

It would also be interesting to do something with charging. Like fix the tires so they don’t require a tire swap, but they must recharge for 20 seconds or something. Not enough to charge the whole battery by any means, but the first team to figure out how to dump a meaningful amount of power in would have an advantage.