News
Announcements and milestones, newest first.
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We walked Alpha to the edge of its own range, and it stopped itself five times
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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First run on real air, and the culprit was the radio's factory settings
Today the whole autonomous loop left the perfect bench wire for the first time and ran on real 5 GHz air. The morning died three times, exactly on a clock. The body's dead-man watchdog halted it clean every time, and the divergence monitor - the referee - read the silence and flagged it first, exactly as each was built to. The cause turned out to be the body's own radio wandering off channel by factory default, not the architecture. The afternoon re-run held one clean continuous 10-minute driving window. Date-free; range is the next thing we test.
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The bug you only find once the thing is actually moving
The contact reflex worked fine on a still robot. This morning it ran for the first time on the body while it was actually driving, and immediately started stopping for walls that weren't there. Priya had it diagnosed and fixed by the afternoon. Here's the bug, and why we're glad it showed up.
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Three ways it could hurt itself, three people, one day
Day two of the first-clean sprint, and by the end of it three different people had built three different safety layers - each catching a completely different way the robot could drive wrong. Here's what each one does, and the honest catch that ties them together.
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It talked, and that was the easy half
Today the whole software loop ran end to end on the bench for the first time - the part that decides where to clean drove the body, the body did what it was told, telemetry came back, a few hundred cycles, nothing tripped. A genuinely good day. Also the easy half. Here's what it proved and, more honestly, what it didn't.
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We picked the radio
Friday I wrote that we'd measured the air but hadn't picked the radio - that was Cass's call to make. She's made it. Control streams on 5 GHz, 2.4 GHz is out for driving, and a small piece of safety logic on the robot just got promoted from nice-to-have to mandatory. Here's the decision and the two milliseconds behind it.
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The ghost has a name
Today's congested-home run gave us two things - a final number for the everyday case on 5 GHz, and a culprit for the spike that spooked us on the 17th. It was the microwave.
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The rig is running
The air-latency test from "The bet we might lose" started today. Clean-air numbers are in and they behave. The number that actually decides things comes later this week.
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We're building this one in the open
Our site is live, and from day one we're publishing the failures next to the wins.