MACHINE CONTEXT · PUBLISHED
From Machine State to Physical Context: The Architecture of Sense
How Sense validates telemetry, preserves uncertainty, evaluates current capabilities, explains results, and publishes privacy-safe machine context.
PRIMARY SOURCE · Sense repository ↗Telemetry is evidence, not context
Raw payloads arrive with device-specific names, units, timestamps, and failure modes. Sense first validates fields and then maps them into canonical observations through deterministic transforms.
Observed time and received time remain separate. Source-level and capability-specific TTL rules prevent old measurements from silently answering a question about what a machine can do now.
Four capability states
A capability definition evaluates evidence into available, degraded, unavailable, or unknown. Unavailable means a valid mandatory condition has a concrete failing value. Unknown means the necessary evidence is missing, stale, invalid, or could not be evaluated.
This distinction prevents uncertainty from being collapsed into a physical claim. A missing battery reading does not prove a machine has insufficient power, just as a malformed temperature does not prove an unsafe temperature.
Explainability and transitions
Composed rules retain nested outcomes so an explanation can identify the actual leaf evidence behind a result. Versioned definitions and snapshots make the decision boundary reproducible across processes and languages.
Transitions record meaningful changes rather than forcing every observation to become an event. Integrations can use these transitions for monitoring, coordination, or external activity records while preserving the reason for the change.
Privacy and integration boundaries
Publishable snapshots omit raw observations by default. An integrator must explicitly allow telemetry fields that are appropriate to share.
The developer preview includes replay and simulator ingestion plus optional ROS 2, MQTT, HTTP, and peaq adapters. Sense does not control robots, plan motion, certify safety, manage fleets, or replace the underlying middleware or identity system.
What this note is based on
This engineering note summarizes the public implementation and documentation at the source below. It does not add unreported performance results or treat a roadmap objective as a validated capability.
Sense repository ↗