It maintains its own map
The robot builds and updates a live map as it moves, on the assumption that the drawing is out of date. The facility model decides which way to go, and onboard sensing decides whether the next two metres are actually clear.
Navigation
Wayfinding
Enterprise wayfinding for buildings that never stop changing. One routing engine serves the visitor at a kiosk, the patient on a phone and the autonomous robot in the corridor, and when the building changes all three re-plan in the same instant.
A map is a drawing.
A building is a moving target.
Signage is printed once. Floor plans are drawn once. Meanwhile a department relocates, a lift goes out of service, a wing is sealed for infection control, and a contractor takes a corridor for six weeks. Every one of those quietly invalidates the map, and nobody finds out until someone is lost, or until a robot drives into a closure.
A route is a claim about a building. We keep the claim and the building in step by making the building something you can query.
The principle the entire platform is built on.
Facility graph level 1 → level 2
One closure
Every affected route redrawn
A member of facilities staff raised it once, from a phone, with a time window. The visitor halfway there received a new direction, and a robot already in transit received a new path. Neither of them had to ask.
What the platform does
A complete wayfinding operation, from the model of the building through to the screen in front of the visitor and the goal sent to the robot.
| Live facility model | Rooms, junctions, doors and lifts held as a queryable graph. Multi-floor from the outset, because a lift is simply another connection with its own rules and its own availability. |
| Role-aware routing | Every route is computed over the part of the building that traveller is entitled to use. Step-free, staff back-of-house, contractor and public routes all come from one engine running against different views of the same map. |
| Closure lifecycle | Disruptions are raised once, approved by whoever owns that class of closure, and activated on schedule. Planned works, unplanned incidents and emergency lockdowns all move through the same controlled path. |
| Instant re-planning | The moment a closure goes live, every journey routed through it is recomputed and every affected traveller is updated in place, including robots already in transit. |
| Governed communications | Affected audiences are drafted a notice automatically, and a person publishes it. A corridor changing state is never on its own sufficient reason to push a message to patients or to the public. |
| Complete audit trail | Who raised a closure, who approved it, what it changed, when it activated and when it cleared, all recorded as it happens and queryable afterwards. |
What the person walking sees
A journey, as it updated under someone mid-walk. They are not signed in to anything. The link came from the admissions desk and belongs to the journey itself.
Journey record entrance → radiology
01
Through the lobby, left at the café level 1
45 m · step-free
WALKED15:02
02
Take lift B to level 2
Lift A was already out of service when this
journey was planned, so it was never offered
WALKED15:04
Re-planning · corridor closed
East corridor shut for a spill. Raised 15:04, approved 15:05, live 15:05. This
journey was routed through it, so this journey changed.
03
Right at the nurses station, second door left
Radiology reception · 60 m · still step-free
CURRENT+70 m · 15:05
The reroute is shown rather than hidden. Someone who has been walking for three minutes and is suddenly told to turn a different way will trust the instruction more readily when the system explains why it changed its mind.
When the traveller is a robot
Mapping
Privacy
Faces blurred on the robot
The camera that supports navigation blurs faces on the device, before a frame is ever published. What makes a robot useful indoors should never be the thing that makes it unwelcome.
Confidence
A position is a claim too
The same commitment as manipulation, one level up. A robot uncertain of its position stops and says so. One that is lost and drives on anyway is the reason these deployments get switched off.
Where it deploys
One engine, several very different vocabularies. What changes between them is the language the operators use. The routing, the approvals and the record stay the same.
Hospitals
Wards, lifts, restricted wings and infection-control closures, with robots moving through the same building on the same model.
Campuses
Buildings and the routes between them, closures for events and works, and a kiosk that tells a visitor where to actually go.
Occupied construction
Work that closes routes while the building stays open, with the approval chain and the cascade of notices that has to accompany it.
Municipal networks
Sidewalks and roads in place of corridors, with works, closures and the detour the public is actually told about.
Transport and venues
High footfall, frequent reconfiguration, and an accessibility obligation that static signage cannot keep up with.
Under a robot fleet
Deployed as the navigation layer beneath mixed fleet orchestration, so dispatch and routing share one model of the building.
How often does your building change?
Hospitals, campuses, sites under construction. If routes go stale faster than signage can keep up, and nobody can see all of it at once, we should talk.