The end of October brings out spooky and scary creatures of the night during Halloween festivities, but here at InOrbit we deal with ghosts, zombies and vampires almost every day. The different fantasy creatures give us a quick shorthand to the different artifact types we have available in our fleet simulation, the first of its kind.

In fact, these creatures are affectionately known as the “Hooli Robotics Horror Story Demo Fleet”, which operate as part of our fictional company, Hooli Robotics. Aside from the playful (scary?) names, there’s a deeper technical reason for all of this. There are many options, both open source and proprietary, for simulating an individual robot operating in a given environment. There are also solutions of creating variations, known as domain randomization, often used to accelerate reinforcement learning. However, what we found was missing was a way to simulate large fleets of robots, and to do that in a way that is both scalable and sustainable.

Most of our customers have enjoyed the Hooli fleet. While customers can’t directly interact with our spooky subjects (yet, but let us know if you want to meet them), in the spirit of the upcoming holiday, we'd like to give you a peek behind the curtain of our internal technology. Read on, if you dare, to learn more about the different types of spookiness that roams the hallways of Hooli…