Straight answers.
What is Adastra, in one sentence?
The operating mind: one mind that perceives, acts and learns across every physical operation it runs, and the runtime that gives it something real to take hold of.
Another robotics middleware, then? An agentic one?
No. Middleware moves messages between things and learns nothing from any of them. Every operation this runs teaches the mind something about running operations, and the next operation starts with what the last one taught. The runtime is how the loop opens; the loop is the company.
So a vendor-agnostic fleet manager with a model on top?
No. A fleet manager assigns tasks to known machines through fixed APIs for a person to watch. It is one of the things this runtime absorbs as a capability, and it is not a thing that learns. Here the agent holds the pen, the platform is the surface it writes to, the Companion is its senses and hands at the machine, and all of it reports to one mind.
What is the operating mind, concretely?
The mind behind every agent we deploy. The agent is its avatar in your operation; the platform is its operating surface and its feed; the Companion is its eyes, ears and hands. The ontology a new site made it model, the record of what an operation actually did, the experience of orchestrating large cross-scenario automation for real: every thread returns to it, and those three are examples rather than the list. It is not a fourth piece and it is never on your network. It is what the three are for.
A runtime, as in an inference runtime?
No. That runs a model on a chip. This runs the operation: the program is what your site does, agents write it, missions are its processes, the world model is its memory and verbs are its system calls. We never reach inside a body — its own intelligence and control loop stay its own. We give it the world it acts in.
Do you compete with embodied foundation models?
No. Those models make a body capable: perception, planning, motion, tool use. None of them gives that body a role in your operation, a claim on a lift, a record of what happened before it arrived, or a way to work with a conveyor that cannot reason at all. The model brings the mind. We bring the world.
Another copilot, then?
The opposite. A copilot sits beside a closed system and explains it to you, because nothing underneath was built to be written. Here the agent holds the pen: it commits the logic that decides what your operation does, and that commit is the same object an engineer's would be.
Is an AI deciding which robot goes through the door?
No, and it never will. That is arbitration: deterministic, solvable in code, and provable. A model is for judgment. Agents write the policy that arbitration follows and argue with what it decided. They are not inside the loop.
What is the Companion?
The mind's eyes, ears and hands. It lives beside a machine, a cell or a site, holds that thing's slice of the world, keeps the ledger of what actually happened there, acts for it when nothing upstream is answering, and speaks for it to its neighbours. The site appliance is its largest size.
What stops an agent doing something stupid?
The platform, not the prompt. Dry run and apply are a primitive; reading and writing are separate grants; a refusal names what was out of range; anything long-running holds a lease with an owner and an expiry. A guardrail written into a prompt is one the next model ignores.
How do we keep control?
Every change reaches production through one gate, whoever wrote it. A person's edit, an agent's commit and the improvement loop's proposal are the same object passing the same review. What grades the loop stays visible to you, and the loop cannot edit it.
What does the operating mind take from our site?
It learns from a desensitised, abstracted model of the work: the shapes and first principles of how operations flow, never a site's raw record. Your operational record stays in your organisation. What carries on is what running your operation taught it about running operations: the ontology it had to model, the shape of the work, which decisions held. The next site benefits from yours having been hard, and you benefit from every site before you.
Do we have to replace our vendors' software?
No. Their fleet manager keeps doing what it is good at, and so does the open middleware you already run. Adastra owns the layer above them: what the work is, who may do it, what holds a resource, and what happened.
Can it run without the internet?
Yes. The Companion authors, promotes and rolls back with the uplink down, and units keep coordinating among themselves. It reconciles when the uplink returns.