Field notes from UBR.

What was tested, what broke, and what gets tested next — shared as it happens, not polished after.

• vdg 8 August 2026 The robot drives back to things it remembers. Eighteen hours of ordinary missions left behind a map of 60 named places. Then we picked the robot up, put it down somewhere else, and told it to go back to the drone.
• vdgcompany 7 August 2026 Selected for NVIDIA's Codefest — with a zero we intend to change. One of fifteen teams selected for NVIDIA's Open Models Codefest. The number we most want to move is a closed-loop test that reached the goal zero times out of four — and the question we had to correct in our own application before anyone else could.
• vdg 4 August 2026 Nobody was watching. That's the point. Our robot now keeps a flight recorder — continuous video and audio on its own disk — and notices things by itself: a person at 14:02, a voice in an empty corridor, labelled and indexed while nobody was at the console.
• vdg 4 August 2026 Three weeks ago this was a voice pipeline on a bench. The field brain grew senses it can verify, survived reality's curriculum, and now navigates space it has never seen — with every mistake published alongside the results.
• vdgcompany 15 July 2026 We applied to NVIDIA's Codefest — to find out what really fits on 8 GB. Fifteen teams, NVIDIA's open models, and one question we can't answer on our own hardware: which model gives a machine the best judgement inside the power budget of something that has to carry its own brain.
• wall 30 June 2026 One robot, two jobs: clean, then paint. Repainting a house is mostly the dirty, dangerous prep — not the paint. So we don't build a paint robot. We build one access platform that carries swappable heads. Here it climbs a rope up the wall, washes, and sands. Drag it around; swap the head.
• solar 30 June 2026 The wiper-bar, version zero. A rain-fed brush that lives on your rooftop array and keeps it clean — no technician, no roof penetration, no operator. The low-fidelity design model we're taking into our first site visit. Drag it around.
• company 29 June 2026 We've joined NVIDIA Inception. UBR has been accepted into NVIDIA Inception — better access to the edge-AI tools and Jetson hardware that put real autonomy on small, low-power machines.
• vdg 28 June 2026 Our bid is in: NATO DIANA's autonomy challenge. UBR has submitted a bid to NATO DIANA's 2027 Multidomain Autonomy of Uncrewed Systems challenge — offline-first autonomy, aimed at the contested, disconnected field.
• vdg 17 June 2026 The robot, version zero. Mid-June, before any metal: a low-fidelity 3D model to plan our tracked robot — the same one that now runs offline on NVIDIA Jetson. Drag it around.