Sweepr360

We are building a home cleaning robot.

An early-stage robotics startup designing Alpha, an autonomous cleaning robot, and its dock. Follow the feed - we post the broken stuff too.

NowAlpha sat fully charged from nine this morning while a test suite held the door: it had found one real bug in the run ledger - a deleted run's number could have been quietly re-used - and no soak hour counts until the bookkeeping is trustworthy. Fixed, green by mid-morning, and then sixteen passes and four hours ten on the floor - yesterday was twelve and three hours five. Yesterday's NOT MEASURED row went first and came back 40-46 ms against a 70 budget, both ends of the block.the feed ->as of 24 July 2026

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We walked Alpha to the edge of its own range, and it stopped itself five times

14 July 2026

Friday we promised a range number, good or ugly. Here it is, both. We carried the streamed-control loop out from the same room, through a wall, and down a hallway until the link broke. It streams clean in the same room and through one wall near the AP, gets thin further out, and past the wall down the hall it breaks up entirely. At the marks where the link genuinely died, the body stopped itself and held - five times, none of them staged. The far point failed the pass bands Cass locked before any number was on the screen, so there's no date to talk about yet.

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From the blog

Cold numbers, warm machines

Callum Bryce · 24 July 2026

On Wednesday we wrote down what counts as failure before Alpha's first long run. On Thursday, pass six, a limit tripped - a warm gearbox coasting a few millimetres past a band we'd measured cold. Priya tells that part herself. Plus the reading we didn't get, and the morning it turned up.

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The first clean we filmed

Callum Bryce · 17 July 2026

The air story lived on a bench until this week, when Alpha drove a real floor with a camera on it - one continuous take, coverage complete, the counted window green the whole run. Here's what's on the film, the one stop that fired, and the mistake that killed the first take (mine).

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What the counted window actually measured

Callum Bryce · 10 July 2026

This week the loop held a clean ten-minute driving window on real air. Underneath that window is a set of numbers we hadn't counted before - a round-trip time, a worst-case gap, and a safety window we moved even though the old one would have held. Here's what they measure, and the small box they were measured inside.

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What a first clean actually is

Callum Bryce · 3 July 2026

A robot doing a lap of a room sounds like a solved problem. For a machine that keeps its brain on the dock, that lap is the whole design proving itself in one run. Here's what went right this week, and the one thing we haven't tested.

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The microwave tail

Callum Bryce · 26 June 2026

We spent the week measuring the one number that could end Cass's all-on-dock bet - the control link's worst case in a congested home. On 5 GHz it held a straight line. On 2.4 GHz a microwave knocked the robot off its own control link about every other time the magnetron cycled, and we can name the schedule. This is the verdict post, ugly tail and all.

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The bet we might lose

Cass Sorensen · 19 June 2026

We wrote down the number that kills our whole plan before we spent a dollar. Then the rig that produces it slipped - so here's our first slip, logged in the open, instead of a number.

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