Why humans
Labs test what you thought of. People test what you didn't.
Structured testing is essential, and it is bounded by the imagination of whoever wrote the test plan. Give a motivated person a goal and a machine to beat and they will do things no plan contains: split up, double back, go completely still, go loud, use the weather, use each other.
That is the behaviour embodied systems will meet in the world. MechaSafari is an environment built to produce it on purpose, safely and repeatedly, with every instrument running.
What we're designing to test
- 01
Adversarial field testing
Your platform against human teams with a goal and a clock.
- 02
Navigation robustness
Mud, snow, deadfall, slope, water, darkness and fog.
- 03
Perception edge cases
Occlusion, low sun, thermal crossover, rain on the lens, people who don't behave like the training set.
- 04
Human-machine interaction
How people read, approach, avoid and mislead your system, and how it responds.
- 05
Fail-safe validation
Does it stop when it should, every time, under pressure and in bad conditions?
- 06
Containment testing
Geofence, boundary and recall behaviour at the edges of the field.
- 07
Cross-platform benchmarking
The same scenario and conditions, run against different machines.
- 08
Environmental robustness
Cold soak, wet, night and the change of seasons.
- 09
Recovery behaviour
Falls, stalls, lost localisation and lost comms, and what happens next.
- 10
Independent reproducibility
A finding counts when it happens again on demand, observed by someone who didn't build the machine.
How an engagement would work
Scope
You bring a platform and the questions you care about. We agree what is in bounds, what isn't, and who owns what.
Configure
We build scenarios around those questions: terrain, light, weather, team size, objective.
Run
Instrumented runs with participant teams: synchronised multi-angle video, thermal coverage, participant positions, a ground-truth map, and the machine logs you choose to share.
Validate
Anything interesting is re-run under controlled conditions until it reproduces, or doesn't.
Report
Findings, reproductions and the evidence behind them, under terms agreed before the first run.
Data, credit and IP
Your platform's data is governed by the agreement you sign, not by our convenience.
Participants' behaviour will not be sold as anyone's training corpus. When a person originates a genuine discovery about your system, it is recorded as theirs: credited and, where it creates value, shared. We think that makes the findings more trustworthy, not less.
What we won't do
- Test weaponised platforms.
- Run anything that can't be stopped.
- Publish a finding about your system outside the process we agreed.
- Claim a result we haven't reproduced.
Where we are, honestly
Exists today
The concept, the scenario design, and this site.
Not yet
A field, a fleet, a dataset, customers, partners or certifications.
Why talk now
Early partners shape the test protocols and the first scenarios.