Research
Questions we're answering
in public.
Some of the repository is settled engineering. Some of it is active inquiry — spikes, prototypes, and experiments, each clearly labeled so nobody mistakes a research thread for a shipped guarantee. This page is the honest tour.
Diverse dual governors
LIVETwo independently-implemented governors evaluate every cycle; a comparator accumulates divergence and escalates the effective posture when they disagree. Diversity as a defense against common-mode bugs — the CERT-006 thread, with property tests over the divergence logic.
A learnable doer, safely wrong
LIVEAn evolution-strategy-trained planner deliberately built to be misalignable: train it on a progress-only teacher and the checker catches it — quantified continuously by the KPI gate's admissibility floors. The doer-invariance thesis, made falsifiable.
Rabbit: conversational robotics
HARDWARE-GATEDA talking robot with a structural guarantee: the LLM (a local Gemma via Ollama, with whisper.cpp ears and Piper voice) has two channels — speak freely, or act through the one typed-intent door. A CI fence proves no compile path from conversation to actuation. Rabbit can chat all day; it cannot drive you into a wall.
docs/hardware/RABBIT_CONVERSATION_DESIGN.mdci/check_mick_actuation_fence.pyrobot/rabbit_model_smoketest.py
Parko: vendor-neutral inference
SPIKEAn early-prototype Rust inference substrate — ONNX Runtime (CPU/CUDA), OpenVINO, TensorRT skeleton — with fail-closed backend selection (no silent CPU fallback) and cross-backend numerical-equivalence tests. Real hardware benchmarks await the Jetson lane; the README says "not yet production," and so do we.
parko/README.mddocs/adr/0009-parko-tensorrt-precision-a2-native-nvinfer.md
Zero-copy transport
SPIKEThe iceoryx2 spike answers a narrow question — can the frozen contract ride a zero-copy channel with the full fault matrix intact, on a minimal (empty) feature set? Yes, measured. Adoption remains a deliberate, separate decision; the dependency stays quarantined until then.
Quantization under a governor
SPIKEWhat does int8 quantization do to a governed planner? The committed scorecard shows fp32 and int8-PTQ byte-equal on admissibility — and a v2 model trading strict acceptance for progress, visible in numbers because the eval harness measures exactly the axes the safety case cares about.
parko/QUANTIZATION_DESIGN.mdartifacts/doer-eval/scorecard.json
READ THE SOURCE
Research with its status on the label.
Spike means spike. Prototype means prototype. The interesting part is that the checker holds either way.