Perception that pays the gas bill

Greetings from Sweden. Nils is spending the week in Sweden and Denmark with two of our most important customers, planning robot rollouts — and he walked into the community update straight from a lunch that opened a new perception use case we hadn't put on the public roadmap yet.

Gas leaks are the third-biggest store cost

In American retail, the three biggest costs are staff, rent, and gas. Upwards of a quarter of a typical US supermarket's monthly gas consumption is leaks.

A PE-backed gas measurement partner of ours already charges about $10,000 a year for quarterly leak surveys. Even at that cadence, retailers save money. The bottleneck is a person walking the store with measurement gear.

Put that job on a robot and two things change:

• Cost per measurement drops hard
• Cadence goes from quarterly to continuous — leaks get caught earlier

We're moving fast toward gas measurement pilots in the next month or two. If those work, the partner's interest runs from several hundred to low thousands of additional robots in the forecast. Simple job: drive the aisle on a schedule, measure, help cut the third-biggest line item.

Company insurance is another angle the community flagged live — worth looking at.

QR onboarding, multiple OEMs

On the main robotics path, QR onboarding is real enough that you've seen it on X:

• Customer's machine issues a QR that invites the robot into the organization
• Robot is piloted until it sees the code and locks into the wider coordinate system
• Next cut: drop the middle pilot step entirely — unbox, power on, show QR, ready

That flow has to work with proper enterprise auth and the right servers, on self-hosted customer setups. We're running it across multiple OEM platforms now. The plan on the table: at least four different robots in Q1 — two Chinese, one American, and one still in stealth (including country).

Las Vegas in October

With the American OEM — BracketBot — we'll make a public appearance in about a month and a half at NACS in Las Vegas, the big convenience-store show. We'll be there with BracketBot and Bruegmann, our investor and retail partner, on the future of robots in retail.

Timeline check

Last update we hoped robots would already be in shipping containers. That slipped. Current plan:

• Containers: November
• Store floors: early January

Open hardware from the lab

The stealth open-source modular robot we're incubating hit real milestones this fortnight:

• Teleoperation in our demo store
• Data collection underway
• Intent to make core components purchasable as early as October
• Discount path with $AUKI when that's live
• Sketching ways full-robot buyers could earn by contributing training data with us

Elsewhere in the week

• Unitree IPO — we joined a RoboStrategy X Space on the listing; worth the hour if you missed it
• Nori — Sixth Sense is getting one from batch two; we have one on the way as well

Come argue with us

We do these on X weekly, then move to Discord for questions, early footage, and the stuff that shouldn't live on a broadcast. If you're reading this from the stream archive, the useful half of the conversation is usually discord.gg/auki.

Watch the whole update on X.

About Auki

Auki is making the physical world accessible to AI by building the real world web: a way for robots and digital devices like smart glasses and phones to browse, navigate, and search physical locations.

70% of the world economy is still tied to physical locations and labor, so making the physical world accessible to AI represents a 3X increase in the TAM of AI in general. Auki's goal is to become the decentralized nervous system of AI in the physical world, providing collaborative spatial reasoning for the next 100bn devices on Earth and beyond.

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