Methodology

A number ships only with its definition, qualification, evidence grade, retrieval date, and direct source. Missing primary evidence remains a visible gap.

Scope and editorial boundary

Bot Landscape is a reference for robot bodies, components, software artifacts, foundation models, market records, and the sources that support their public claims. It is not a buying recommendation, safety certification, performance benchmark, or claim that a product is commercially available.

Source of truth

Hand-authored HTML is canonical. Generated JSON, search, sitemap, CSV, and build metadata are projections validated against it.

Primary-first

Vendor manuals and product tables supply hardware specifications. Filings supply market facts. Papers supply experimental results only.

Explicit absence

means the inspected primary source did not publish a comparable value. It never means zero.

Classification before comparison

Physical form controls specification comparability. Application controls market and deployment grouping. A new physical class receives a new table rather than a wider payload column.

Separate bodies

Wheeled mobile manipulators, bipeds, quadrupeds, fixed arms, aerial systems, marine systems, wearables, and end-effectors do not share a payload row.

Separate conditions

Rated and peak load, loaded and unloaded endurance, standing and walking payload, and charge time and runtime remain different metrics.

Identity is data

Galbot G1, Unitree G1, and AgiBot G1 are different machines. Product, paper, model, and evaluation-body identities are never inferred from a shared name.

Comparison rule. Products may be compared only when they share one data-class and the same row definition. Difference inspection compares authored state and text exactly; it does not normalize units or infer equivalence. Completeness counts describe source coverage, not product quality. A blank intersection is preferable to a false field comparison.

Evidence grades and precedence

M Manual

Vendor manual, datasheet, product specification, or official engineering documentation. Preferred for hardware.

F Filing

Exchange- or regulator-published filing. Preferred for audited money, ownership, and shipment disclosures; never a hardware specification.

R Research

Paper, model card, official project page, or released code. Supports experiments and artifacts, not an unmentioned product body.

P Press

Dated company announcement or named article. Used for launches, funding, and status with attribution.

A Analyst

Named research house with a dated methodology. Used for market estimates and ranks, never product specifications.

A reseller sheet is labeled as a reseller source. It does not inherit vendor-manual status. Later official documentation normally supersedes earlier marketing for the same claim, but both values remain printed when the conflict itself matters.

How a claim ships

  1. Resolve the entity. Confirm vendor, product, variant, physical class, and date.
  2. Read the primary source. Preserve the source unit, test condition, version, and qualification.
  3. Normalize only when safe. Derived conversions are labeled. Different definitions never become one row.
  4. Attach evidence. Every quantitative cell links to a source record with a direct URL and retrieval date.
  5. State conflicts and unknowns. Conflicting values are not averaged; missing values stay .
  6. Validate the release. Structural checks reject broken ids, missing evidence, mixed classes, stale counts, and invalid exports.
Research-to-product boundary. A paper proves only the bodies, checkpoints, tasks, and conditions it names. Research lineage can explain direction; it cannot prove that an announced robot runs an exact checkpoint.

Corrections and source submissions

Corrections are evidence changes, not votes. Submit the exact page, row, or source record, the replacement primary URL, and the reason the current claim is wrong, stale, or incomplete.

Aggregator specifications without a primary document are not accepted. A source blocked to automated probes may remain cited when the access state is recorded explicitly and a human inspected it.

Releases, freshness, and citation

The homepage publishes the newest source retrieval date. build.json identifies the deployed commit and generated counts. Stable row anchors cite facts; stable evidence ids cite sources.

Cite a fact

Use the row URL and retain the evidence marker shown in the cell.

Cite a source

Use sources.html#<topic>-<grade><counter>.

Consume the data

landscape.json follows the published JSON schema.

Catalogue cards export as first-class entities. Table values export as typed claims with class, metric, subject-header path, evidence ids, and a reported/missing state. Numeric-looking text is not coerced into a unit the source did not define.

Each exported source carries structured document identity, publication/version fields when authored, retrieval and access status, its direct source URL, any URL fragment, and a stable registry URL. A missing optional field is null; the exporter does not infer unpublished metadata.

Retrieval date means “last inspected for the cited claim,” not a guarantee that every mutable vendor page is unchanged. A source refresh changes that date only after review.

Licensing and third-party material

Repository code is MIT-licensed. Original editorial text and the compiled landscape dataset are available under CC BY 4.0. Vendor manuals, trademarks, photographs, videos, engineering models, quoted passages, and other third-party material remain under their owners’ terms.

Model boundary. Interactive previews fetch commit-pinned vendor files under the source repository’s license. Bot Landscape does not relicense or re-host vendor geometry, and a model preview is not a specification claim.