A robot that cannot say where it is cannot act. Not roughly which room, but the exact position and orientation, in a frame something else can also read.
| Map-owner model | Scan-agnostic model | |
|---|---|---|
| Where the map comes from | The vendor's own coverage | Your existing scan, in any format |
| Works on a private site | Only where coverage already exists | Anywhere you have captured |
| Who owns the capture | The vendor | You |
| Capture hardware | Tied to the vendor's pipeline | Any scanner you already own |
| Deployment | Cloud, tied to the map | Cloud, private VPC, self-hosted, on-device |
Stated plainly: for a facility nobody has scanned but you, a global map is not an answer. The coverage that makes a consumer map useful outdoors is precisely what a distribution centre, a plant or a defence facility will never have.
Two related explainers: VPS vs SLAM covers why the two run together rather than competing, and GPS-denied navigation covers what happens when the satellite fix degrades rather than disappears.
For a mixed fleet specifically: robots, drones and wearables covers the case where people, AMRs, drones and wearables share one floor. VDA 5050 standardizes how a controller sends orders and how a vehicle reports status, but map formats and navigation stay vendor-specific, so a mixed fleet still has no shared spatial reference.
