DemosDISCOVERY DEMO

The Map Was Given. The Obstacles Were Not.

A map can be handed to a machine. A crate that was not there yesterday cannot. What these robots know about the things in their way is not configuration and not a scan — it is the accumulated record of having run into them. And what one discovers, the others can learn.

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The question

The map of the warehouse can be handed over. The crate standing in the middle of it cannot. So: where does a robot's knowledge of what blocks it come from, when nobody wrote that part down?

This simulator has collisions and physics, which is what lets a failure be shown here rather than described. The first of these two demos ran on one that had neither, and said so.

RecordingRobots in a warehouse that has physics — and where their knowledge of what blocks them comes from, given that nobody wrote it down for them.

What it was handed

A floor plan, and its own measurements. The areas, their doors, and what each door opens to — and that it is a quarter of a metre wide, which is what lets it refuse a gap instead of discovering it. All of that was written by somebody. None of it mentions a crate.

The plan, as handed over. No crate on it.

How it finds out the rest

It runs into things. The world tells it that it touched something; it works out where the thing must be from where it was standing and how wide it is, and it writes that down. Then it backs off and goes around.

Bump
it hit something the plan does not hold. The mark and the way around it are decided together, in the same breath.
Graze
it scraped a wall the plan does hold. That is its own bad driving, not a discovery, so nothing is learned and it tries the leg again.
Fail
no road left that a body this wide can take. The mission ends, and says which marks closed it.

Restart it in the middle of a mission and it works out its road again from wherever its body ended up — around the crates it found before it went down. Nobody reloads anything.

A thing, or somebody

The same bump means two different things and the contact cannot tell them apart. So it says out loud what happened, and listens.

Its own account, sent once
It tells the others where it was and what it was heading into — its own account, in the past tense, sent once the act is down in writing.
Same place, same moment
If one of them says it bumped in the same place at the same moment, that was not a crate. The mark is taken back, here and in every robot that had already copied it.
Past each other
And the two get past each other without negotiating anything: the name that sorts first has the way, the other backs down its lane and steps aside.

What bumps into a robot standing still is another robot. So a bump it hears about is copied down; a touch it hears about is not.

What this does not do

The demo is a proof of concept, and the honest list is short enough to print.

No scannerIt has no scanner. Everything it knows about an obstacle it learned by hitting it, which is slow and leaves gaps — a lidar is the next thing on the list, not a thing already there.
The floor plan is still handed overThe floor plan is still handed over. Building one from scratch, in a space nobody described, is the module after that.
Two of three are told where they areTwo of the three robots are told exactly where they are, which no real robot is. The third is not: it runs on its own wheel count, and half a second stuck against a crate leaves it half a metre wrong about itself — and then wrong about what it touched.
Not a fleetThree processes on one machine are not a fleet.
Reading it back re-runs the codeReading the record back re-runs the robot's own code. Change how it decides a road and the same record arrives somewhere else.

Grounded in

Where this comes from.

The Robot Forgets. The Puppet Doesn't.

The same robots, asked the prior question: not where their knowledge comes from, but what is still theirs once the process that held it is gone.

Read it