Robotics evidence guide · automated editorial preparation, not expert review
Write a robot task contract before collecting results
A task contract states the initial conditions, permitted actions, endpoint, timeout and outcome rules before the first evaluation attempt. Otherwise a successful demonstration can quietly redefine what counted as success.
Evidence and interpretation
Maha’s proposed contract is deliberately narrower than a product specification. It describes one evaluation, not every supported behavior. Give it an immutable revision and include the environment and controller references. Changes to the target tolerance or assistance policy create a new comparison condition. Keep original results under the old contract; do not relabel them as if they were measured under the new one. Software change-control practices provide an analogy, but the actual task fields are Maha’s design.
Proposed evidence workflow
- Freeze planned attempt IDs, initial object position, target and timeout.
- Define success, failure, assistance, abort and invalid-trial handling before running.
- Record revisions and require an explicit reason for any post-run exclusion.
Worked illustration
In the local example, the object must be released at a named grid cell within the step budget. A human-assisted transfer is completed-with-assistance, not autonomous success. A grip failure remains a recorded attempt rather than disappearing from the denominator.
Limits
The toy task contract governs only a discrete simulation. Its grid-cell acceptance rule is not a dimensional tolerance, contact-force limit or real-world safety requirement.
Sources and review
Locator: Level 1 / Package Requirements: Version Policy, Change Control Process, Documentation, Testing
Quality declarations connect package-quality claims to versioning, documented interfaces, review and testing requirements.
Boundary: Package quality is not whole-robot certification. Maha has not been assessed at a ROS quality level.
Inspection and reuse basis
Selected sections inspected 2026-09-14. Original explanation and link; no source redistribution. This is not independent expert review of this article.