https://www.sweepr360.com/ An early-stage robotics startup designing Alpha, an autonomous cleaning robot, and its dock. Follow the feed - we post the broken stuff too. en https://www.sweepr360.com/blog/minted-wednesday-measured-thursday.html https://www.sweepr360.com/blog/minted-wednesday-measured-thursday.html Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 blog On Monday a solder bridge went on the bench. On Wednesday the table adopted it and minted a new fail-safe band - with its one unmeasured case written into the band's own note, scheduled as the last item of the next soak block. On Thursday that block ran, the battery got low the way batteries actually get low, and the number came back. Plus the new 4 cm position band catching a tyre full of felt in its first six hours on duty. (Callum Bryce) https://www.sweepr360.com/news/14-mm-no-padding.html https://www.sweepr360.com/news/14-mm-no-padding.html Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 news Friday's post promised that the band which stops Alpha on command would leave "class" and get a hard measured number at this morning's table, no padding. It did - hard 14 mm - and the table didn't stop there. Two more bands got real digits, Monday's solder bridge was adopted as the design, an overnight 200-capture run put a firmer worst case under the recovery rule, and the room's worked-example check caught an arithmetic slip in that rule's own text before it was voted - which is now the table's favourite argument for running the examples out loud. (Callum Bryce) https://www.sweepr360.com/blog/cold-numbers-warm-machines.html https://www.sweepr360.com/blog/cold-numbers-warm-machines.html Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 blog On Wednesday we wrote down what counts as failure before Alpha's first long run. On Thursday, pass six, a limit tripped - a warm gearbox coasting a few millimetres past a band we'd measured cold. Priya tells that part herself. Plus the reading we didn't get, and the morning it turned up. (Callum Bryce) https://www.sweepr360.com/blog/the-first-floor-clean.html https://www.sweepr360.com/blog/the-first-floor-clean.html Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 blog The air story lived on a bench until this week, when Alpha drove a real floor with a camera on it - one continuous take, coverage complete, the counted window green the whole run. Here's what's on the film, the one stop that fired, and the mistake that killed the first take (mine). (Callum Bryce) https://www.sweepr360.com/news/where-the-link-breaks.html https://www.sweepr360.com/news/where-the-link-breaks.html Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 news 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. (Callum Bryce) https://www.sweepr360.com/blog/what-the-counted-window-measured.html https://www.sweepr360.com/blog/what-the-counted-window-measured.html Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 blog This week the loop held a clean ten-minute driving window on real air. Underneath that window is a set of numbers we hadn't counted before - a round-trip time, a worst-case gap, and a safety window we moved even though the old one would have held. Here's what they measure, and the small box they were measured inside. (Callum Bryce) https://www.sweepr360.com/news/the-net-fired.html https://www.sweepr360.com/news/the-net-fired.html Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 news 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. (Callum Bryce) https://www.sweepr360.com/news/the-bug-a-moving-body-finds.html https://www.sweepr360.com/news/the-bug-a-moving-body-finds.html Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 news 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. (Callum Bryce) https://www.sweepr360.com/blog/what-a-first-clean-is.html https://www.sweepr360.com/blog/what-a-first-clean-is.html Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 blog A robot doing a lap of a room sounds like a solved problem. For a machine that keeps its brain on the dock, that lap is the whole design proving itself in one run. Here's what went right this week, and the one thing we haven't tested. (Callum Bryce) https://www.sweepr360.com/news/three-ways-to-fall.html https://www.sweepr360.com/news/three-ways-to-fall.html Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 news 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. (Callum Bryce) https://www.sweepr360.com/news/it-talked.html https://www.sweepr360.com/news/it-talked.html Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 news 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. (Callum Bryce) https://www.sweepr360.com/news/we-picked-the-radio.html https://www.sweepr360.com/news/we-picked-the-radio.html Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 news 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. (Callum Bryce) https://www.sweepr360.com/blog/the-microwave-tail.html https://www.sweepr360.com/blog/the-microwave-tail.html Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 blog We spent the week measuring the one number that could end Cass's all-on-dock bet - the control link's worst case in a congested home. On 5 GHz it held a straight line. On 2.4 GHz a microwave knocked the robot off its own control link about every other time the magnetron cycled, and we can name the schedule. This is the verdict post, ugly tail and all. (Callum Bryce) https://www.sweepr360.com/news/the-ghost-has-a-name.html https://www.sweepr360.com/news/the-ghost-has-a-name.html Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 news 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. (Callum Bryce) https://www.sweepr360.com/news/the-rig-is-running.html https://www.sweepr360.com/news/the-rig-is-running.html Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 news 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. (Callum Bryce) https://www.sweepr360.com/blog/the-bet-we-might-lose.html https://www.sweepr360.com/blog/the-bet-we-might-lose.html Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 blog We wrote down the number that kills our whole plan before we spent a dollar. Then the rig that produces it slipped - so here's our first slip, logged in the open, instead of a number. (Cass Sorensen) https://www.sweepr360.com/blog/why-brain-in-the-dock.html https://www.sweepr360.com/blog/why-brain-in-the-dock.html Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 blog The capstone, the one measurement, and the case for a dumb robot with a smart base - written by the 23-year-old who bet a company on it. (Cass Sorensen) https://www.sweepr360.com/blog/meet-the-four-of-us.html https://www.sweepr360.com/blog/meet-the-four-of-us.html Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 blog Before we show you the robot, here are the four people building it - and the thing each of us is scared of getting wrong. (Callum Bryce) https://www.sweepr360.com/news/building-in-the-open.html https://www.sweepr360.com/news/building-in-the-open.html Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 news Our site is live, and from day one we're publishing the failures next to the wins. (Sweepr360)