Every figure on this site comes from a document, and every document is named on the page that uses it. This is where we set out what we will accept as a document, what we will not, and what happens between finding one and publishing a number from it.
It is written down because a sourcing policy that lives in somebody's head is indistinguishable from not having one.
Ranked by how much it costs the publisher to be wrong. A filing a regulator can withdraw is worth more than a page a marketing team can edit, and both are worth more than a claim nobody signed.
Filings a manufacturer makes to a third party who can withdraw them. They are the only category of evidence that carries a consequence for being wrong, which is why they outrank the manufacturer's own documents.
Limit. They only cover what regulators care about — safety, emissions, radio — so most of a specification sheet has no filing behind it.
The datasheet, user manual and service manual. Written for someone who has to install and repair the robot, which makes it far more conservative than the same company's marketing.
Limit. Headline figures are best-case: runtime measured walking unladen, payload measured static. We record the condition alongside the number where the document states it.
Independent measurement under stated conditions, and often the only public source for how a platform behaves outside a demo.
Limit. The unit tested is frequently modified, and a result from one lab's controller is not a property of the shipped robot.
A dated snapshot of what the company claimed on a given day. Useful for release dates, availability and the first appearance of a figure.
Limit. It is edited silently and often. We archive the page as we read it, so a citation still resolves after the next site redesign.
What we see and ask directly: interviews with engineers, hands-on time, measurements taken on a trade show floor. It is the only source we can commission when the others are silent.
Limit. Our sample is whoever agreed to talk to us and whatever was on the stand. We say when a figure came from us rather than from a document.
Where price bands, lead times and regional availability actually live — a manufacturer rarely publishes any of them.
Limit. Regional and negotiable. We treat these as a range and date them, never as a price.
These are not sources we rank low. They are things we will not publish a number from, however plausible the number looks.
No stated conditions, edited to the good take, and occasionally teleoperated without saying so. A video can tell us a robot exists; it cannot tell us what it does.
Citing them would launder somebody else's unsourced figure into ours, and the whole point of this site is that the chain ends at a document.
Useful for knowing what to go and check. Never the thing we publish.
We are glad to receive them, and we will publish them the moment they appear in something we can cite. An email is not a source a reader can check.
Including our own tooling. Models are used here to find and read documents, never to supply a number that no document contains.
Six steps, the same for every specification on the site.
The document is archived with its URL and the date we read it. Manufacturers redesign, withdraw and quietly edit; a citation that depends on their site staying still is not a citation.
The figure is read out with its page or section recorded, and any condition the document states — laden, at 20°C, in a given mode — is kept with it. Units are normalised for comparison and the original is preserved.
Every row carries a link to the document it came from. A row nobody can trace does not publish as verified, whatever we believe about it.
The extraction is read back against the archived document before it goes live. Most errors on a site like this are transcription errors, not judgement errors.
The row appears with its state and the date of the source, so a reader can see how old the evidence is without asking us.
On the schedule below, and whenever something happens that could have changed it.
What the reader sees at the end of it is one of three states next to the value — verified, unpublished or unverified. The RV Score page explains what each state means and why an unverified figure is excluded from scoring rather than quietly averaged in.
A specification is a claim about a moment. These are the moments that send us back to the document.
The part of a sourcing policy that shows whether the rest of it is real.
Every specification on a robot page can be challenged from the row itself. You do not need an account, and you do not need to be the manufacturer.
There is no third outcome. If we cannot produce the source we published from, the row goes back to unverified until we can.
A changed value appears in the robot's change history with what it was, what it became and why. Nothing is edited quietly, including by us.
A catalogue that never shows a correction is either perfect or not looking. We would rather be visibly the second than pretend to be the first.
What the catalogue actually holds, counted from it rather than quoted from memory. These figures move as we work, and they are the number we will answer with when anyone asks how big this is.
Every category we define has robots catalogued under it. The empty cells are specifications a manufacturer has not published. We leave them empty on purpose: an estimate in that space would be indistinguishable from a measurement a week later.