The “last metre” was just the beginning

It feels a bit silly to be building anything right now. Especially an “AI” company. The world feels tilted, the economy uncertain, the noise constant.

And yet here we are, teaching a little robot named Lily to move through a massive space using only what it sees, how it perceives depth, and a few fancy-smancy algorithms based on imitation and reinforcement.

We love to assume. Two that keep coming up:

1. Our past was somehow better than our present or future.

2. Humanoid robots are the inevitable form factor.

When we put Lily into a real environment, that second assumption started to crack. Mimicking the human body often looks like progress, but might actually be optimizing for a past state — a complicated solution searching for old problems.

At AugustMille, our journey to build the Spatial Graph, the infrastructure layer that lets robots see, think, and act in real buildings, has taken us down some fascinating experimental paths. One of those was Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs)

Lily roaming the hallways and saying “Watch out, coming through”, or asking people for directions wasn’t exactly charming…

They can fetch a remote, pick up objects, and move around a room—but the moment they step into an unfamiliar environment, they’re lost…