Concept note · the lab vocabulary
Autonomy
Machines that carry a job from start to finish without a hand on them.
What it is
A machine that carries a job from start to finish without a hand on it. The premise is the robot vacuum’s, taken seriously at scale: do nothing and it works. Not tele-operation, not assistance — the owner’s entire contribution is placing the machine and walking away, and the job is done when they return.
In the lab
- Wash Bot →
- The owner workflow is the product’s name: carried to the roof, it finds true center, cleans the whole exterior on a closed litre of water, and is carried away finished — 60 Wh covers the job with margin.
- Autonomous Mowers →
- Fleet choreography: units deploy to zones with offset work phases, hold their work clocks entirely when someone crosses, and self-dock at the truck that brought them — one operator, many acres.
Our position
Autonomy is a workflow claim, not a navigation claim. The interesting measurement is never “can it steer” — lidar, GPS, and edge sensing are a known lineage — it is how much of the human’s day the machine actually absorbs. So the products are named after their workflows: set it on top, walk away; truck in, three units out, stripes by dusk. Terrain gets a vote — lanes bend around what is actually there rather than ruling themselves across a map that was wrong — and oversight is consolidated instead of eliminated: one visible operator shadowing a fleet, one dock where units return, empty, and wait.
Honest limitations
Autonomy relocates the work into edge-case engineering, and the envelope is defined by its exceptions — the soft-top a vacuum skirt cannot seal, the terrain surprise no map predicted. Both machines’ choreography is validated in simulation at this stage, not in the field, and we treat that distinction as load-bearing. “Do nothing and it works” also assumes a prepared world: a dock positioned, a zone assigned — the setup cost is small, but it is not zero, and pretending otherwise is how autonomy claims go counterfeit.
Related in the vocabulary
- Adhesion →
- Meets it in Wash Bot — holding onto a working surface that was never designed to be climbed.
- Human-aware safety →
- Meets it in Autonomous Mowers — sensing the person before contact — the machine yields first, every time.
The experiments are the proof
Every claim in this note is made concrete somewhere in the lab — the idea exists because the machines needed it.
The map of the lab →