Can one pool serve robots from different vendors?
Yes. A Czar Grid serves every robot in the building, from any vendor, over the facility's own network, with a separate latency budget for each one. Each robot keeps its own on-board model and safety behavior.
· 3 min read
IN SHORT
Yes. One Czar Grid serves every robot in the building regardless of who made it. Substrate holds a separate latency budget for each robot, so a humanoid, a mobile robot, and a pick arm from different vendors share the same perception, decision, and language models without waiting on one another. Each robot keeps its own on-board model and its own safety behavior.
Yes. That is the reason the pool is in the building and not inside any one robot. A Czar Grid serves every robot on the floor, from any vendor, over the facility's own network. A warehouse running mobile robots from one vendor, pick arms from a second, and humanoids from a third draws all of them from the same pool. The vendors do not have to agree with one another. They only have to reach the rack.
One pool, many latency budgets
The hard part of serving a mixed fleet is not that the robots differ in shape. It is that they differ in how long they can wait. A humanoid mid-step cannot wait as long as a pick arm between picks, and an automated vehicle on a terminal has a different budget again.
Substrate handles this by holding a latency budget per robot rather than per pool. Each request is served within the time that particular robot can afford, and if the pool cannot meet it, that robot falls back to its on-board model while the others keep being served. A slow request from one vendor's machine does not stall another vendor's machine.
The models themselves are shared. The perception that tells a humanoid a pallet has moved is the same perception that tells a mobile robot the aisle is blocked. Running it once for the floor, rather than once per robot and once per vendor, is what makes a shared pool worth having.
What each vendor keeps
Nothing about the pool changes what a vendor owns on its machine. Each robot keeps its own on-board model for reflexes and falls back to it when the pool cannot answer. Stops, speed limits, and motion limits stay on the robot as the vendor delivered them. The vendor's fleet software keeps running the fleet; the pool serves inference to it rather than replacing it.
A vendor does not have to share anything with another vendor to use the pool. The pool sees requests and serves answers. Which vendor's robot asked is a matter for the record, which the operator holds, not for the other vendors on the floor.
How a mixed floor is set up
E31 Consulting puts Element 31 engineers on site with the operator's automation team, the integrator, and each of the robot vendors. The work is to connect each fleet to the pool over the facility's network, set each robot's latency budget, and confirm fallback behaves as each vendor expects. Site tasks that involve more than one vendor's robots are authored in Agency Studio with bounds and approved by named roles, so the handoff between a mobile robot and a pick arm is a recorded, replayable task rather than an arrangement between two vendors' engineers.
A vendor can also ship the Grid itself. Under Czar Chassis, a robot vendor or systems integrator delivers the same Grid under its own name with its own fleet, and the pool still serves whatever other robots the site adds later. One pool for the building is the design in both cases.
The solutions for warehouses page describes a mixed floor in more detail, and the Czar Grid page covers how several Czars are joined into one pool.
Questions this raises
- Do the robot vendors have to integrate with each other to share the pool?
- No. Each vendor's fleet connects to the pool over the facility's network and is served independently. Vendors do not exchange data with one another; the operator holds the record of what was asked and answered.
- Does a slow robot from one vendor hold up robots from another?
- No. Substrate holds a latency budget per robot, so each request is served within that robot's own window. A robot whose budget cannot be met falls back to its on-board model while the others continue to be served.
- Can a vendor ship the pool with its own fleet and still have it serve other vendors' robots?
- Yes. Under Czar Chassis a vendor or integrator ships the same Grid under its own name. It is still one pool for the building and serves any robot the site later adds.
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