‹ Culture 3.14 · What we ask ourselves
Question · Physical Intelligence
How should a system act when perception is not enough?
Stopping has a cost, carrying on with a poor estimate has another, and the choice has to be made before it happens.
Why it matters
In a digital operation, when information is missing the system can wait without consequences. In a physical operation, waiting is also a state: there is an object in the air, a machine occupied and an environment that goes on changing.
The decision about what to do with insufficient perception cannot be taken in the moment; it has to be designed.
What we know so far
Declaring a safe default behaviour in advance for each failure mode works better than any reactive logic. Reducing the speed or the reach of the movement is usually preferable to stopping dead.
We are exploring this in controlled scenes in the Laboratory, with a deliberately small scope.
What remains open
We do not know how a physical system should ask for help without leaving the environment in a worse state than the initial one.
And we lack a reasonable way of estimating when perception is insufficient, instead of discovering it from the result.