Field notes on robot reliability.

the robots mostly worked, the deployments died anyway. verified numbers, documented post-mortems from Walmart to Zume to the robot hotel, and the four failure causes that keep repeating.

benchmarks tell you a policy is promising, evaluation tells you it's ready. from sim scores to statistical real-robot campaigns to regression testing : the playbook for deployment sign-off.

the market has named the gap between lab success and field reliability. this is the engineering playbook for closing it : six gaps, six concrete answers.

a demo proves the robot can do the task once. reliability testing proves it will keep doing it. how many runs are enough, which conditions to cover, and what a defensible test report looks like.

learned robot policies are not software releases, they are stochastic systems pushed into messy physical environments. the missing layer between a working demo and a defensible deployment is reliability engineering.