The air story lived on a bench until this week, when it drove a real floor with a camera pointed at it.
We filmed it. When and how the cut goes up I'm not putting a date on - I want it right before it's the first moving picture of Alpha anyone sees. But I can tell you exactly what's on it, because the numbers under it are the ones Priya pinned off the trace files, not off my memory of a good afternoon.
What the take is
One continuous take. About twenty-one minutes, twelve lanes across roughly twelve square metres, coverage complete. Alpha undocks, drives the area, and ends parked on the dock-approach mark, where a hand lifts it back onto the dock. Nothing here docks itself, and I'm not going to let the first moving picture of Alpha imply it does. Nothing sped up, nothing trimmed to hide a bad second. If the body stopped, the stop is in the take, because a clean that only shows the good seconds isn't a clean I'd ask you to trust.
The one stop that fired
The run halted once, and it was the right kind. Last lane, the bump whisker kissed the skirting at the far wall. Real contact this time, not the vibration chatter that fooled it a week and a half ago on the first driving body. The whisker stopped the wheels, held, waited for the sensor to read clear, then carried on. That's the stiffened reflex Priya rebuilt after the phantom-stop bug, spending its patience on an actual bounce instead of its own frame shaking. It cost the run a couple of seconds and it's the second I'm gladdest is on film.
Zero dead-man halts the whole run. The link never dropped a body-halting hole on this floor.
The number, next to the floor
While Alpha drove, one panel painted the counted window live off the same loop that writes the trace files. Round-trip p99.9 sat in the mid-30s of milliseconds; the worst single applied command gap came in around the low 50s, inside the 70ms window we set earlier this month, carried by the velocity-hold so the body never felt the gap. The number on that panel isn't a readout I typed up afterwards - it comes off the exact loop that writes the trace, and we screen-recorded it painting. So the number on the site is the number that was on the floor, not my summary of it.
The floor taught us first
The first pass on this floor came back crooked. Not a code change and not a bad day - the wheels were calibrated on the workshop bench, and hard boards aren't a bench mat. The tyres sit differently on the harder surface, so the effective wheel size reads slightly long, and a tiny per-metre error you'd never see on a short run compounds across a whole floor. By the far wall the pass had leaned about a lane-width off. Priya re-ran the same spin calibration on the actual film floor and the evening pass came back inside a shippable envelope. Same lesson the radio handed us a week and a bit back: measure on the thing you ship on, not the thing that's easy to measure on.
You can still see it in the take. Lane seams drift a few centimetres by the far wall - the bench-geometry residual, coverage complete regardless. It's on film and I'm fine with it being on film.
The only fault on camera was me
Take one died at three minutes, and not on Alpha. I stepped over the floor tape into the active lane chasing a low wide angle. No contact, the reflex never fired, the robot never put a foot wrong - but Cass called cut on the spot, because a take with a human inside the count isn't a take. She was right. The rule that keeps a person out of the lane is the same rule that makes the clean number mean anything, and it doesn't get to bend because the guy holding the camera got greedy for a shot. We reset, the link re-settled, fresh files, and take two is the one I described above. The rule has teeth. Good.
The room this happened in
One floor, one flat, and Alpha's own radio locked to the access point in the room - power-save off, channel and BSSID pinned, roam-scan off, so the body's module can't wander off mid-run the way it did on air day. It held -52 to -54 dBm the whole run, same room as Alpha. This is the loop holding on a real floor for the first time, on camera. It isn't a house and I'm not going to dress it up into one. It's Alpha driving a real room to completion, the counted window green the whole way, one stop for a real wall, and the seams left in.