DRAFT — not for publication
Domestic & Consumer
Proprioceptive Debt: Why Long-Lived Domestic Robots Must Periodically Recalibrate Body Schema
A forward-looking argument that continuously-operating home robots accumulate sensorimotor drift ("proprioceptive debt") and require scheduled self-recalibration, with design implications for safety around people.
Summary
DRAFT — not for publication. This is a forward-looking Veyrum Research working paper.
Long-lived domestic robots operate for months without the factory recalibration that industrial arms receive. We argue that accumulated sensorimotor drift is a first-class safety variable and propose a "recalibration budget" as a design primitive.
The argument
- Wear, thermal cycling, and payload variation shift the mapping between commanded and actual motion.
- Around untrained users, children, and pets, small drift compounds into contact-force error.
- A scheduled self-recalibration ("sleep") bounds the debt; the cadence is a ratable safety property.
Open questions
- What observable signals best estimate accumulated drift without external instrumentation?
References
- [NEEDS-VERIFICATION] Foundational proprioception/calibration literature — to be grounded by Scout before publication.