What we ask of design partners

Design-partner intake is not yet open. There is no form to fill in, no list to join, and no one to write to about it. What follows is a description of what a design partnership will involve when intake does open, written so that an operator, an integrator, or a robot vendor can read it and decide whether their floor is the kind of floor we have in mind. It is not an invitation and should not be read as one.

A real floor with more than one vendor on it

The first thing we will ask for is a working facility. A warehouse with mobile robots and pick arms from different vendors, a plant floor where humanoids or mobile manipulators work alongside arms and vision and PLCs that were there long before, a terminal with automated vehicles and cranes and inspection whose feeds cannot leave the site. The common thread is that robots from more than one vendor share the floor and will share the pool.

A demonstration floor, a lab, or a single-vendor zone built to show the pool working is not what we are after. The pool is designed for mixed fleets under separate latency budgets, and the questions worth answering only appear when a second vendor's robots are drawing from the same Grid as the first. The solutions page describes the three kinds of facility where this is already true.

People who will name roles and read the record

Agency Studio requires that site tasks be authored, bounded, and approved by named roles, and that every run be recorded. A design partner will be asked to name those roles from its own staff: the automation lead who authors, the safety officer who approves, the people who may read and replay the record. We will ask that they actually read it, and tell us what it fails to show them.

This is the part of a design partnership that most resembles work. A partner's safety officer will be asked to confirm, from the record and from the floor, that stops and speed limits stayed on the robots as their vendors set them, and that a pool that was paused left robots that stopped rather than guessed. A partner's automation lead will be asked to set latency budgets with each vendor and to report where the budgets were wrong.

A posture decision made and written down

Posture is a choice per site. A design partner will be asked to make that choice before the first node is installed: air-gapped, with signed update bundles carried in on media, or connected only to the systems the site already secures and has declared, with Local Bridge holding the list. A mixed estate will be asked to make the choice for each building.

We will ask for the decision to be written down with the name of the person who made it, because that is how a Grid is meant to be run and because a design partnership that skipped it would teach us nothing about how a real site arrives at the decision. The technology page describes both postures.

A pilot on the destination, not a prototype

A design partner will run its pilot on Czar, the same sealed and attested node that will make up the whole floor's Grid, under the same single subscription line that covers hardware, platform license, and sustainment. There is no partner edition of the appliance and no separate commercial form. One Czar serves a small floor, which is usually the right place to start. When the floor expands, more nodes are joined and the pilot node stays.

In return for running on the real thing, a partner will be asked for patience with the record. Evaluation on the pool, fallback behavior, adaptation on the site's own captures, and the replay of task runs will all be examined in more detail than a production site would normally tolerate. That examination is the point of the partnership, and it happens on the partner's hardware inside the partner's network, with nothing leaving the building.

Vendors and integrators as partners

A robot vendor or systems integrator shipping a Grid under its own name through Czar Chassis will be a design partner of a different kind when intake opens. What we will ask of them is similar: a real customer floor, a plain account of what the robot keeps on board and what it asks the pool for, and an agreement with the facility that keeps the record and the named roles with the operator.

Until intake opens, the most useful thing a prospective partner can do is read the How to buy page and the proposal article, and look at its own floor with those in mind. There is nothing else to do before intake opens, and this article will be revised when it does.