138: Chapter 138 G-Explorer: Wasteland Robot Dog

From its very inception, G-01 was not designed for mine inspection.

Its underlying architecture—non-periodic gait, passive fault tolerance, and foot contact force closed-loop—had only one core purpose.

To find a universal mobility solution for complex terrain in extremely unstructured environments without any prior environmental maps, with severely restricted hardware sensors, and even when vision and LiDAR completely failed.

Mines happened to be the first industrial scenario to host this technology, proving the massive advantages of weak-vision-dependent foot contact force closed-loops and non-periodic state machines in combating uncertainties in the Physics world.

This architecture could inherently be extended and applied to even more scenarios.

Field rescue, geological exploration, power line inspection, underground utility tunnel detection, and even extreme security and unmanned reconnaissance.

G-01's technical route had potential in any occasion requiring stable movement on unstructured terrain.

Of course, G-01 was essentially a validation prototype.

It was designed to validate the core conjecture that non-periodic structures could generate passive fault-tolerance capabilities in mechanical systems, rather than an engineering machine designed for multi-scenario adaptation and mass production.

If Low Entropy Workshop wanted to become a truly engineering-oriented company, survive in the commercial jungle of the Real World, and build barriers, relying solely on a single G-01 was far from enough.

It needed a multi-platform series capable of adapting to different scenarios, payloads, and sizes.

In the Physics world of legged robots, everything was ruled by the square-cube law.

When the body size was proportionally scaled up to twice its original size, its contact area and structural strength typically grew only by the square, while its volume and mass skyrocketed at the rate of the cube.

This meant that mere mechanical scaling would lead to a comprehensive imbalance in the inertia matching of the body joints, instantly pushing the original motor torque density and reducer fatigue life to their limits, and even causing the original control algorithm parameters to fail completely.

Different scenarios had vastly different demands for the platform's configuration, power, endurance, sensor configuration, and communication capabilities, and these differences would ultimately form strong counter-forces in response, imposing completely different constraint boundaries on the underlying universal architecture of the non-periodic state machine.

But what Jiang Lin was pondering at this moment was whether there was a technical kernel that could be shared among different scenarios.

The non-periodic state machine was obviously shareable.

Whether it was mines and utility tunnels deeply buried underground or variable outdoor environments, as long as stable movement on unstructured terrain was required, the non-periodic state machine—which treated terrain as an unknown disturbance—was the most solid defense line.

Its essence was to use dynamic nonlinear feedback at the control level to hedge against the insufficiency of hardware mechanical rigidity.

This passive fault-tolerance capability was a universal underlying architecture.

MPS-Kernel was also shareable.

When facing brand-new scenarios and configurations, designers did not need to rewrite inverse kinematics and dynamics solvers from scratch.

Structural parameter optimization, gait phase search, and foot trajectory planning for different configurations were essentially constrained solving in multi-dimensional nonlinear spaces.

This was precisely what MPS excelled at: finding the optimal solution that satisfied multiple physical constraints through mathematical pruning and heuristic algorithms within a massive search space.

The quick-release foot module was equally shareable.

No matter what working conditions were faced, the foot, as the sole component that directly collided, rubbed, and cut violently with the unknown Physics world, would always be the consumable with the highest damage rate and fastest wear in the entire mechanical system.

A standardized foot module equipped with dual mechanical and signal quick-release interfaces was the key to realizing cost reduction and improving on-site maintainability for the entire technical route.

However, configuration, power, energy, communication, and sensor setups had to be scenario-specialized.

Having figured these out, Jiang Lin began to draw the future multi-platform technical architecture diagram of Low Entropy Workshop.

At the bottom layer was the universal technical kernel, containing three core pillars.

The non-periodic state machine algorithm, the foot contact force high-frequency closed-loop control module, and the MPS-Kernel framework serving as the underlying toolchain.

This layer completely stripped away any specific physical form and commercial scenario, serving as the common mathematical and logical foundation for all robot variants.

It determined the robot's neural reflection speed and evolutionary self-learning capability.

Moving up one layer were the universal engineering modules.

Here, Jiang Lin designed a series of standardized hardware and software interfaces.

First was the quick-release foot standard interface, adopting a composite locking structure of a mechanical dovetail groove and high-reliability spring pins, with built-in six-point contact micro-brushes used to transmit foot pressure sensor signals.

Second was the leg joint standardized drive unit, which encapsulated a high-performance brushless motor, high-precision harmonic reducer, absolute dual encoders, and an integrated servo drive board into a highly compact independent cylindrical module, providing three standard specifications: large, medium, and small. Robots of different sizes only needed to combine drive cylinders of different specifications like Lego blocks.

Furthermore, the redundant navigation architecture module solidified the cross-calibration logic of industrial-grade high-precision IMU, multi-camera visual odometry, and magnetometer into the underlying firmware, allowing any upper-layer navigation algorithm to directly call upon this high-reliability pose estimation source.

These modules could be directly reused across different scenario variants, and R&D personnel only needed to choose building blocks of different specifications based on the maximum joint load and cost budget.

Moving up another layer was the "Scenario Specialization Layer" directly facing the market.

Here, the constraints of the universal kernel were released, and the fuselage geometric configuration parameters were reconstructed according to the scenario.

Energy solutions were specialized according to endurance demands, communication schemes were adapted to local conditions, and sensor payloads were mounted on demand.

And most importantly, scenario-specific failsafe handling logic.

The core idea of this diagram was not to foolishly build an omnipotent machine capable of solving all problems, but to use a solid universal technical kernel to efficiently spawn countless scenario-specialized variants through modular configuration and block-style setups.

This was just like the automobile industry in the Real World.

Volkswagen's MQB platform, Toyota's TNGA architecture—on the same chassis platform, engineers could pull out sedans, off-road SUVs, hardcore pickups, and even urban van trucks by adjusting suspension stiffness, wheelbase length, and body shell configuration.

The underlying logic of the chassis and transmission was universal, but the upper-layer product form and tuning parameters were completely specialized according to the consumer's scenario.

In the robot industry of the Real World, the multi-platform, modular idea was actually not new, and many top Boston Dynamics imitators had told similar stories on PPTs.

But the special thing about Low Entropy Workshop was that its universal kernel was not based on expensive, hard-to-change hardware designs.

Hardware in this changeable world was instead the most easily changed variable due to supply chain shortages or cost pressures.

Low Entropy Workshop's kernel was based on the algorithmic core and mathematical model of the non-periodic state machine and MPS search framework.

The portability of the algorithmic kernel was far stronger than that of the mechanical platform.

Mechanical changes required re-molding, machining, and testing, whereas when facing new mechanical sizes, the algorithmic kernel only required MPS to run a section of calculations in the background to regenerate a set of dynamic parameters and control gains fully adapted to the new configuration.

But for this highly sci-fi and industrially aesthetic idea to land, relying solely on drawing a few pretty architecture diagrams in the workstation was far from enough.

Without the baptism of the mud and gravel of the real Physics world, any architecture was just castles in the air.

He had to come up with at least one scenario-specialized concrete engineering solution under the limited resources of the Wasteland, build it with his own hands, make it run smoothly in the wilderness, and prove the feasibility of this route.

Jiang Lin ultimately chose the field exploration scenario.

The reason was very simple, because he was the only person on this Wasteland who needed to do field exploration.

In this world with extreme material scarcity and extremely harsh geographical environments, the only means to acquire resources and information was to walk out and delve deep into those unknown areas buried by pre-civilization ruins and radioactive dust.

Jiang Lin established the official engineering code name for this field exploration variant.

"G-02 Explorer (referred to as G-Explorer, Wasteland Collaborative Autonomous Exploration Platform)"

This trip to the Wasteland, he came riding that material-laden electric off-road motorcycle.

The motorcycle's endurance had been deeply modified, capable of running nearly two hundred kilometers when fully loaded.

He could also launch the industrial-grade drone carried with the vehicle, flying tens of kilometers away into the air to capture high-resolution orthographic images and multi-spectral surface data.

This meant that he had established a preliminary exploration mode of air-ground coordination.

Riding the motorcycle for close-up ground approach himself, with the drone providing a bird's-eye view from the sky.

But when facing the true limit terrain of the Wasteland, this mode quickly hit a physical ceiling.

The motorcycle was a wheeled structure, and its passability highly depended on continuous compacted surfaces.

Some terrains, such as sudden sharp gravel steep slopes, loose-sand deep trenches formed by flash flood erosion, or architectural ruin accumulation piles that had weathered severely and could experience secondary collapses at any time.

Facing these places, Jiang Lin did not dare to brazenly charge in on the motorcycle at all, and even due to a lack of protective equipment, he did not dare to risk leaving the vehicle and approaching on foot.

In these blind spots of wheeled vehicles, the drone could certainly take pictures, but photos could not collect physical samples, could not measure the true mechanical strength of soil and rocks, and even less could they penetrate thick broken walls to detect hidden metal or energy reactions inside.

He needed a hound.

A machine that could honestly follow behind the motorcycle on flat ground, carrying scientific payloads, geological sampling equipment, backup high-energy batteries, and long-distance communication relay modules for him, reducing the load pressure on the motorcycle.

Once encountering dangerous terrain where the motorcycle could not enter and personal safety faced extreme threats, this machine could break away from the formation according to instructions, step into that perilous situation alone, replace him to complete exploration, scanning, and sample collection, and then walk out safe and sound.

From the very beginning, it carried a strong color of cooperative combat.

It needed to be able to run along with him, and also, after Jiang Lin pointed to a certain unknown dark region, walk in alone, judge the terrain by itself, plan its gait by itself, collect samples by itself, and finally find the return route by itself.

This would be a collaborative multi-legged platform equipped with extremely high edge-end autonomous exploration capabilities.

Therefore, the configuration of this field exploration variant must absolutely not copy G-01.

G-01 was designed for obstacle-crossing validation, but relative to a true field expedition platform, it was too compact, with short legs, small ground clearance, and insufficient load and endurance.

G-Explorer needed greater ground clearance, at least fifty centimeters, to cross the semi-buried rocks and dry ditches common on the Wasteland.

It needed a larger body to cram in enough batteries and scientific payloads.

It needed stronger drives so that it would not pant when climbing thirty-seven-degree gravel slopes.

But once the body was larger, the weight went up.

Once the weight went up, the pressure on the reducers and motors went up accordingly.

This was a causally intertwined nonlinear multi-variable engineering coupling problem.

Relying solely on human engineers using traditional empirical formulas to piece together parameters on scratch paper would easily fall into the vicious cycle of adding flour when it was too wet and water when it was too dry.

Jiang Lin created a new project in MPS-Kernel.

"G-Explorer_Morphology_Optimization (G-Explorer Mechanical Configuration Topology Optimization and Kinematics Search)"

The core purpose of this project was to maximize the platform's payload ratio by changing the aspect ratio of the body, the geometric lengths of the thighs and calves, and the mounting baseline positions of the six legs on both sides of the body, under the rigid constraints of the maximum power density of the fixed-parameter brushless motors currently in Jiang Lin's spare parts inventory and the ultimate output torque of the highest-grade harmonic reducers in stock.

At the same time, three indicators had to be rigidly met: a chassis ground clearance of no less than 50 centimeters, a single-step vertical obstacle-crossing height of no less than 40 centimeters, and a physical endurance mileage of no less than 10 kilometers under full load.

This computation ran on the workstation for a full month.

Because this was not a small mathematical problem like finding the optimal sort5 in CPU instruction sets that could be exhausted in dozens of seconds.

The structural parameter space of a multi-legged robot was a continuous, high-dimensional topological space filled with local extrema traps.

To find the global optimal solution within it, extremely fine discretized sampling of the space had to be performed, and hierarchical pruning algorithms had to be introduced.

When MPS-Kernel was originally born, its underlying mathematical logic was constructed to search for micro-kernel microcode instruction sequences.

To enable it to cross over and handle complex mechanical structures and dynamic mechanics optimization, Jiang Lin had forcefully written a large number of additional spatial geometric constraint modeling, multi-rigid-body dynamics simulation interfaces, and contact-mechanics-based nonlinear finite element evaluation plugins for it over the past several cycles.

However, this was precisely what Jiang Lin wanted to do.

Broaden MPS's capability boundaries.

If Low Entropy Workshop truly established a foothold in the future, from heavy-duty rescue platforms and field exploration platforms to small utility tunnel inspection platforms, completely different configuration constraints might be proposed.

By then, if every model of machine had to rely on the human R&D team to redraw diagrams and re-calibrate dynamic models, the company's R&D costs and time cycles would be rapidly dragged down.

He had to let MPS undertake the adaptive exploration work of structural parameters, link lengths, and motor matching at the bottom layer.

Humans only needed to define the boundaries, and leave the rest to mathematics.

One month later, MPS compressed a batch of candidate configurations according to the variable intervals, constraints, and failure samples pre-defined by Jiang Lin.

G-Explorer's body length was fixed at 1.2 meters, and its width at 0.7 meters.

The body frame was welded from aluminum alloy square tubes, with the exterior wrapped in recycled aluminum plate skin.

Each of the six legs consisted of three sections: the femur, the tibia, and the foot, with the joints using that batch of harmonic reducers in his inventory.

The motors were all high-power, high-voltage brushless DC motors, with their casings retrofitted with heat dissipation fins he had cut himself.

As for the design of the foot terminals, he had opened a separate sub-project for it.

Along the over-twenty-kilometer route from the Stone House to the Sky Curtain Station across the Wasteland wilderness, at least four drastically different surface types would be passed.

The hard Gobi near the Stone House consisted of compacted red clay, which had high friction and was not prone to sinking.

The dried riverbed in the middle section was a mix of pebbles and fine sand, possessing an unstable surface prone to slipping.

The gravel beach in the north-northwest direction had sharp gravel that exerted extreme cutting and impact forces on the foot terminal materials.

The ruins accumulation around the Sky Curtain Station featured concrete chunks, rusted steel bars, and metal fragments, resulting in extremely irregular terrain.

These four completely contrasting surfaces presented physical demands on the foot terminal materials and geometric configurations that were in total conflict within the mechanical equations.

The hard Gobi required a small area and high rigidity, the dried riverbed required a large area and structural flexibility, the gravel beach demanded shock and cut resistance, while the ruins accumulation called for multi-limb gripping.

No single material could simultaneously satisfy all requirements.

Since Physics materials could not be all-powerful, the logic of engineering had to change.

In the design blueprints of the G-Explorer, Jiang Lin decisively and creatively introduced a "Standard Quick-Release Foot Terminal Module Interface" at the end of the tibia.

The bottom of each foot terminal was not directly fixed to the tibia, but rather connected to the end of the tibia via a set of precision-machined self-locking dovetail grooves, supplemented by a high-rigidity mechanical spring latch.

Inside the interface, he cleverly arranged six wear-resistant contact brushes made of special alloy; when the foot terminal module slid into the dovetail groove and emitted a crisp clicking locking sound, the brushes would automatically fit together, seamlessly connecting the signals of the thin-film pressure sensors and temperature sensors inside the foot terminal to the acquisition bus at the root of the thigh.

To replace a foot terminal, the entire process only required pressing the spring release pin firmly with a finger, sliding it outward, and then pushing a new foot terminal in.

The entire process took less than five seconds, without requiring any tools such as a screwdriver or wrench.

Instead of pursuing a universal omnipotent hardware, it decoupled the extreme conflicts of the physical environment through ultimate replaceability.

Targeting the four complex terrains along this route, Jiang Lin used the equipment in the workshop to craft four completely different forms of replaceable foot terminal modules.

The hard Gobi foot terminal adopted the optimal formula POM-CF-07 that he had previously tested and proven in the Wasteland.

Its configuration was a small-diameter hemisphere, with several parallel sharp shallow grooves cut into the bottom.

Its task was to crush floating sand on the hard red soil with extremely high material rigidity, providing unparalleled forward thrust.

For the soft ground foot terminal, the base material selected was ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene with high toughness.

In the middle of the foot terminal, he installed a flexible anti-sinking expansion disk with a diameter of up to twenty centimeters, resembling a flying saucer.

The edges of the disk body were cut thin, allowing a certain degree of elastic warping.

When the machine stepped into the soft riverbed, the expansion disk rapidly deployed, reducing the single-foot pressure to a fraction of a dozen times the original, preventing the legs from sinking.

The gravel beach foot terminal used a thickened POM-CF-07 injection-molded part as its core skeleton.

However, around the periphery of the entire sphere, Jiang Lin used waste tire rubber to undergo repeated heating and hardening in a small vulcanizing furnace, completely wrapping it with a layer of recycled wear-resistant rubber buffer pad fifteen millimeters thick.

This layer of rubber acted like an efficient physical low-pass filter, specially designed to absorb and dissipate the fatal high-frequency transient shock waves generated when sharp gravel smashed against the joints.

The ruins foot terminal was the module with the most peculiar configuration.

Its bottom was not spherical, but instead composed of three hard steel bendable claws connected by torsional springs and arranged radially at 120 degrees.

When the foot terminal landed on irregular concrete chunks or rusted iron pipes, the three claws would undergo passive deflection under the action of gravity, conforming to the geometric shape of the object to grip inward, forming a physical form closure rather than merely relying on frictional closure.

It allowed the G-Explorer to stand steadily atop the crumbling ruins like a mechanical giant eagle.

Before setting off on each vehicle-borne expedition, Jiang Lin would first pull out the offline map to evaluate the terrain distribution of the first and second halves of the journey.

Then, with extreme caprice, he would equip the six legs of the G-Explorer with completely different mixed-and-matched foot terminal combinations.

Did the front limbs need to undertake more obstacle probing, ruin climbing, and terrain scraping tasks?

Then equip both the left and right front legs with the invincible gripping "Ruins Foot Terminals".

Did the middle and hind limbs bear more than seventy percent of the whole machine's static load and forward driving force during walking?

Then equip them with the wear-resistant and shock-resistant "Gobi Foot Terminals" or "Gravel Foot Terminals".

Allowing different hardware modules to perform their respective duties under the command of the same non-periodic state machine.

This modular thinking became the cornerstone of the entire chassis system's high survival rate in the Wasteland.

However, the energy system remained the largest hardware mountain lying ahead of the G-Explorer.

From the Stone House to the Sky Curtain Station, a one-way trip was over twenty kilometers; although the straight-line distance looked short, due to the large number of detour paths and vertical undulations along the way, the actual total physical mileage of a round trip was definitely not less than sixty kilometers.

For a hexapod robot with a self-weight plus load approaching one hundred kilograms, performing high-dynamic walking on harsh loose unstructured terrain, due to frequent foot slippage and joints frequently contending with unstable load-bearing surfaces, its comprehensive energy consumption per kilometer, through rigorous estimation by MPS, would be as high as 0.25 to 0.4 kWh/km.

This meant that relying solely on onboard battery drive, after stepping out and walking a dozen kilometers in the field, the G-Explorer's power would be completely depleted, making it utterly incapable of supporting the long round-trip journey of up to sixty kilometers.

"If a long-distance expeditionary hound were made to run all the way from its doorstep, it would die of exhaustion before even reaching the hunting grounds."

Sitting in front of the blueprints, Jiang Lin used a pencil to cross out the naive idea of an all-walking expedition.

During the long-distance travel phase spanning dozens of kilometers, it would act as dead weight, securely strapped onto the rear cargo trailer or low-position carrier rack of an electric off-road motorcycle.

Powered by the heavily modified high-energy battery pack of the motorcycle as the main power source, it would be towed at a speed of fifty kilometers per hour to complete an ultra-long-distance tactical approach across relatively flat abandoned highway sections.

Although this wheel-leg cooperative energy usage strategy appeared somewhat cumbersome during transfers and failed to exhibit the dashing all-the-way-running style seen in some sci-fi movies, in the real Wasteland, it was the only method that could balance long endurance with high mobility.

Next was the navigation system.

This was a subsystem in the Wasteland sufficient to drive any Real World senior architect insane.

In the Real World, positioning and navigation could heavily rely on the GPS or BeiDou navigation satellite constellations distributed in near-Earth orbit.

As long as signals from more than four satellites could be received, RTK high-precision differential positioning could provide centimeter-level absolute coordinates.

At the same time, cities were filled everywhere with 5G network signals emitted by base stations and clear indoor wireless radio beacons.

But here, every single meter of navigation required the machine to measure it raw with its body.

Jiang Lin built a quadruple-redundant passive navigation architecture with a strong retro-sci-fi color for the G-Explorer.

The first layer was strapdown inertial navigation.

Utilizing two fiber-optic gyroscopes as the core of high-frequency pose estimation.

The inertial navigation could provide millisecond-level relative motion speeds and angular changes, but after walking continuously for a few kilometers, its accumulated mathematical integration errors would snowball larger and larger, causing the position to completely drift thousands of meters away.

To hold down the drift of the inertial navigation, Jiang Lin introduced the second line of defense.

Visual odometry.

Utilizing three sets of explosion-proof binocular cameras at the front and sides of the fuselage to capture feature points of surrounding rocks, dead trees, and ruin sections at high frequencies.

By calculating the relative motion matrix of feature points in the front and rear frames of images, the accumulated errors of the inertial navigation were reversely corrected.

However, this system would be instantly blinded due to the loss of feature points during sky-filling sandstorms with extremely low visibility or when passing through purely shifting sand areas devoid of optical features.

Therefore, there had to be a third layer: magnetometer and Wasteland magnetic anomaly matching navigation.

The geomagnetic anomalies of the Wasteland, which were geomagnetic interference that engineers in the Real World avoided at all costs, were in Jiang Lin's eyes an unalterable map.

In his hiking trips over the past few years, he had ridden a motorcycle through many places, utilizing the onboard bus to silently record the geomagnetic intensity, three-axis components, and gradient characteristics at tens of thousands of coordinate points, piecing together a rough "Local Magnetic Anomaly Baseline Map" in his workstation.

When the G-Explorer was walking, the fluxgate magnetometer in the middle of the fuselage would measure the magnetic characteristics of the current location in real time, and perform pattern matching with this database in the background, thereby yielding a rough absolute position calibration point.

The final layer was Jiang Lin's ultimate trump card.

The low-altitude celestial autonomous navigation module.

When the machine executed detached exploration missions at night or during dust-thin daytime, a high-magnification telephoto starry sky camera with a micro servo gimbal located at the top of the fuselage would automatically push aside the protective cover and point toward the sky.

It searched for high-brightness stars with known celestial coordinates in the star catalog.

Combined with the local time base maintained by the high-stability crystal oscillator, the body attitude calculation, and spherical trigonometric equations, it reverse-derived the absolute geographical latitude and longitude of the machine on the Wasteland sphere.

The four systems were tightly fused together using EKF for high-frequency state estimation on the underlying communication bus and factor graphs for low-frequency global correction in the background.

Under any extreme and harsh operating conditions, the algorithm kernel would evaluate the confidence weight of each navigation source in real time.

When feature points were abundant, the visual weight was turned up.

When a sandstorm struck, the visual weight dropped to zero, and the magnetic anomaly and inertial navigation stepped up.

When camping out at night, the starlight camera turned on to perform a thorough mathematical reset for the entire system.

At any time, it could ensure that at least two navigation sources were in a high-working state of cross-validation.

Jiang Lin demonstrated extremely high engineering endurance on this module.

He spent a full half-year forcing the mechanical backlash of the celestial navigation camera gimbal down to the micron level by manually grinding shims, elevating the angle measurement precision from the previously crude ten arcseconds to an astonishing within five arcseconds.

At the same time, he expanded the underlying database of magnetic anomaly matching to all hundreds of thousands of magnetic sampling points he had recorded in his past excursions, ensuring that even if the machine deviated five kilometers off the route, it could sniff out the way home through magnetism.

As for the communication between the machine and Jiang Lin far away in the Stone House dozens of kilometers away, it completely relied on a clever candy crumb relay network.

The rear of the G-Explorer's fuselage was equipped with a mechanical compartment similar to an automatic dispenser, inside which were neatly stacked eight palm-sized radio relay nodes whose shells were assembled from recycled plastic.

When the G-Explorer detached from the motorcycle and independently penetrated deep into the unknown dark domain, the master control algorithm would calculate the radio signal-to-noise ratio between the current position and the previous relay point in real time.

Once it was discovered that signal attenuation approaching the critical threshold was caused by mountain blocking or excessive distance, the mechanical compartment at the rear would emit a crisp ejection sound, precisely casting a relay node onto the ground.

After this node landed, four supporting legs made of high-elasticity steel sheets would automatically spring open relying on pure mechanical tension, propping the node up amidst the gravel.

At the same time, the miniature flexible solar panel on top would automatically deploy to start charging, and the low-power radio module inside the node would immediately start up, automatically connecting in series with the front fuselage and the rear base into a point-to-point multi-stage communication link.

Under ideal conditions, the eight nodes could stretch out a data corridor up to eighty kilometers long across the wilderness like a string of flashing torches.

Although due to the strong electromagnetic clutter and noise interference of the Wasteland, the communication bandwidth of this corridor was pathetically low, capable of transmitting only a few hundred bytes of plain-text device status codes and highly compressed low-resolution black-and-white terrain silhouettes per second.

But for Jiang Lin, it was already enough.

This data stream of a few hundred bytes flowed through the relay chain and finally landed on the screen of his motorcycle's handheld terminal, turning into lines of jumping green telemetry characters.

Current coordinates, remaining battery power, joint temperatures, and the foot-landing state of every step.

"As long as this data link is not broken, as long as its heartbeat packet is still jumping on the screen, I know my dog is still alive in that dead silence of ruins ahead."

If one day, the G-Explorer encountered an irreversible disaster deep within the mountains, in the final millisecond before completely crashing, it could also transmit the finally collected surveying and mapping data and the last high-compression-ratio image of the fault scene back into Jiang Lin's hands through this string of candy crumbs.

In terms of scientific payloads, a multi-spectral sensor mast that could be raised and lowered by a pneumatic push rod was installed on top of the G-Explorer's fuselage.

Usually retracted inside the aluminum alloy skin, it rose to a height of one meter during operation, carrying a stereo depth camera, an infrared thermal imaging camera, and a miniature laser-induced breakdown spectrometer used to identify mineral composition.

On its chest position, Jiang Lin used discarded hydraulic robotic arm parts to piece together a crude but extremely powerful three-degrees-of-freedom single-arm miniature mechanical claw for it.

When the state machine determined that there were extremely valuable rare metal fragments or unweathered specific rock samples around, the G-Explorer would switch to a static squatting posture, controlling the mechanical claw to accurately extend, pick up the sample, and drop it into the six-compartment modular sample bin with an electric sealing cover located at the back of the fuselage.

This scientific payload system containing the mast, camera, mechanical claw, and sample bin controlled its total weight at fourteen point five kilograms.

Placed in a cutting-edge laboratory in the Real World, it might be directly rejected due to crude craftsmanship and anti-vibration fatigue performance failing to pass vibration table calibration, but in the current Wasteland, this was already the most formidable geological scientific payload in terms of combat effectiveness that Jiang Lin could piece together by his own single strength.

However, in the entire research and development history of the G-Explorer variant, the module that consumed Jiang Lin's longest effort and possessed the most complicated logic was placed by him at the very top of the entire architecture diagram.

"Active Fault Isolation and Mechanical Self-Healing Layer"

Designers drinking coffee in an office can never imagine the cruelty of a real field.

On the Wasteland, there are no accompanying after-sales support engineers, no fully equipped precision toolboxes, and even less a spare parts warehouse that can dispatch SF Express at any time.

If the G-Explorer malfunctions deep in that lifeless Wasteland fifty kilometers away from the Stone House, no one can go in to save it.

If it breaks down, it will have only one end.

Slowly rusting and being buried in the sandstorms, eventually becoming an insignificant member of the countless pre-civilization garbage in the wilderness.

Therefore, it must learn to save itself.

In front of the workstation, Jiang Lin pulled up all the detailed failure databases accumulated by the Low Entropy Workshop in the past regarding the operation of G-01 and various legged platforms.

Reducer jams, motor burnouts, foot end fractures, wire harness wear and short circuits, control board moisture, IMU drift, battery over-discharge...

For every possible way to die that could instantly paralyze the machine, Jiang Lin used code logic to write a set of fully automated fault-degraded operation schemes and purely mechanical self-healing strategies for the G-Explorer.

For example, if the worst-case scenario occurs, such as a mechanical jam of the joint reducer or a burnout of the driver board, causing a certain leg to completely stiffen at a fixed angle and no longer be able to take regular steps.

Traditional control software would instantly trigger system failure and collapse because forward kinematics cannot solve for a feasible solution.

But in the underlying state machine of the G-Explorer, Jiang Lin wrote a heterogeneous disabled gait adaptive reconstruction algorithm.

Once the master watchdog detects that a leg's servo driver has no current response for 10 consecutive milliseconds, or the angle fed back by the absolute encoder falls into a deadlock, the battery management system will initiate hardware isolation within one ten-thousandth of a second to completely cut off the power supply of that channel and prevent short-circuit fires.

At the same time, the core aperiodic state machine instantly initiates reconstruction, treating the jammed leg as a dead weight or a pure rigid crutch.

Recalculating the remaining five-foot support polygon, center of gravity projection, and joint torque distribution in the SE(3) pose space.

The walking gait of five legs is geometrically twisted and ugly. The G-Explorer will walk like a huge arthropod insect that has been severely injured, its body bumping violently up and down, its forward speed will decay by seventy percent, and the torque load on the remaining joint motors will surge.

But Jiang Lin had long since exhaustively enumerated all compensated gait phase distributions from six legs to five legs, five legs to four legs, and even three surviving legs under limit states through the MPS-Kernel in past cycles, solidifying them into the EEPROM of the underlying microcontroller.

"As long as the spatial distribution of the remaining three legs can still form a minimum support triangle, my algorithm can make it limp back to my presence from the radiation zone."

Jiang Lin had absolute confidence in this set of algorithms.

Then comes the physical failure with the highest probability of occurrence: the foot end suffers overall material fracture or dovetail groove deformation and scraps when violently stepping on hard objects.

Jiang Lin designed a purely mechanical broken-limb discarding and backup-bullet replacement mechanism with a strong Wasteland violent aesthetic style.

Utilizing the hollow Physics space inside the tibial square tube, he pre-inserted a secondary standard foot end in a compressed standby state inside each leg.

Under normal conditions, this backup foot end is firmly pushed against by a powerful release spring wound from high-stiffness piano steel wire, and stuck in the middle of the tibial tube by a compact mechanical ratchet positioning pin.

When the external working foot end module encounters an irresistible violent lateral impact, causing the structure to fracture or misalign exceeding the design threshold, the huge reverse tangential force generated toward the longitudinal axis of the lower leg at the instant of landing will directly push open the internal ratchet self-locking pin through a purely mechanical connecting rod push rod.

The jammed and damaged old foot end module will be constrained by the guide groove and thrown away to the side of the lower leg.

Immediately afterwards, the powerful spring inside the tibial square tube is instantly released, violently pushing the backup foot end hidden inside downwards along the linear slide inside the lower leg.

The moment the backup foot end slides to the end of the tibia, its built-in dovetail groove latch will automatically lock under the action of the outer spring pin.

The entire self-repair and replacement process, from the fracture, triggering, and abandonment of the old foot end, to the pushing out, positioning, and secondary locking of the new foot end, completely does not rely on any sensors, does not rely on any electronic control code, and does not consume even one ten-thousandth of a kilowatt-hour of airborne electrical energy.

It is a closed-loop process driven purely by Physics force and mechanical mechanics logic.

The entire mechanism is composed of only six parts.

Two springs, one ratchet pin, one push rod, one positioning slot, and one backup foot end.

Because in Jiang Lin's Wasteland survival and machining engineering experience, he had established an indestructible iron law.

Under extremely harsh environments, the smartest and most complex systems are often the first to die.

And those simplest and crudest mechanical Physics logics composed of springs, levers, and latches are always the last trump card that can keep you alive.

...

All self-healing and degradation logic were ready, and the writing work of the high-level control decision tree of the following system cost Jiang Lin a full two years from the fourth year to the sixth year of the Wasteland.

The following mode is the largest engineering increment faced by the G-Explorer variant after the hardware architecture is established.

In order to enable the hexapod platform to keep up with an electric off-road motorcycle, Jiang Lin installed a small dual-axis servo closed-loop rotating gimbal with extremely fast high dynamic response at the most conspicuous position on top of its body.

Mounted on the gimbal was a narrow-field-of-view, high-frame-rate camera with a hardware lane-line recognition acceleration chip.

He spent several months rewriting the microcode of this chip, eliminating all logic regarding lane lines and traffic lights, and reconstructing it into a feature extractor specially designed to identify specific spectrums.

On the back of the windproof tactical coat he often wore and the mudguard of the electric motorcycle's rear cargo rack, he carefully hand-painted a specific two-dimensional matrix coding pattern with a high degree of geometric asymmetry using high-reflectivity infrared reflective paint.

Under the following mode of the G-Explorer, the top gimbal camera would firmly lock onto this set of constantly swaying infrared reflective markers ahead.

At the same time, as a safety guarantee in close-range heavy fog weather, Jiang Lin mounted an ultra-wideband radio ranging and positioning module on the rear of the motorcycle and the chest of the G-Explorer respectively.

These two modules mutually sent high-frequency picosecond-level pulses at a frequency of two hundred times per second, weaving an invisible radio cable in space, and the ranging accuracy reached an astonishing ten centimeters.

The gimbal vision provides high-precision relative direction vectors, and UWB provides absolute relative distance.

The two are fused together to form the benchmark input of the following logic.

But the complexity of the following logic far exceeded the idiotic toy model of the front car goes and the back car follows.

Off-road motorcycles are a typical wheeled structure.

When driving, it can withstand some fine obstacles through the slight deformation of large-diameter pneumatic tires, or rely on strong forward inertia to forcefully rush through some large areas of soft hollow sandy land or gravel gentle slopes at extremely high speeds.

But the G-Explorer is a heavy hexapod walking platform with heavy self-weight, single-point ground clearance, and single-point load-bearing.

On the same route, if the motorcycle wheels roll over without sinking, if the G-Explorer blindly steps along the motorcycle's tire tracks, the local pressure instantly generated by its foot end can easily puncture the fragile surface of the sand layer, causing a single leg to experience deep sinking and slipping, or even directly snapping the lower leg due to strong lateral shear force.

Therefore, the core of the following algorithm written by Jiang Lin is called the autonomous path re-planning logic under reference corridor constraints.

The trajectory driven by the motorcycle in front is not a one-dimensional red line that must be stepped on in the G-Explorer's brain, but a three-dimensional virtual motion corridor centered on that trajectory, widened by three meters on both sides, and possessing a certain geometric tolerance.

During the following process, the upper-layer path planner of the G-Explorer will frequently examine the terrain features inside this corridor.

It will use its own depth camera and foot-end contact force feedback to search for footing points with the safest friction and the most stable load-bearing structure within the corridor, while dynamically maintaining the overall general direction without deviating from the motorcycle's advancing principal axis.

Therefore, it is actually a dynamic following system that is highly submissive macroscopically and possesses autonomy microscopically.

The design continued to iterate from the fourth year to the seventh year, experiencing countless catastrophic failures and frustrating local re-dos in the middle.

After the first version of the prototype ran a full-load simulation run of up to twenty kilometers, Jiang Lin eagerly pulled out the telemetry data.

It was found that the internal temperature of the core battery pack soared to a dangerous red line close to sixty-five degrees in the second half of the operation.

The polymer separator began to undergo microscopic degradation under high temperature, causing the electrochemical internal resistance of the battery cells to rise sharply, and the output power of the joint motors to plummet drastically.

The reason is that when the hexapod platform walks under heavy load, the heat emitted by the joint drive board is conducted through the fuselage frame, turning the battery compartment, which is in a sealed and waterproof state, into a terrifying incubator.

Jiang Lin had to completely disassemble the fuselage, overthrowing the original integrated structure.

Then, imitating the cooling principle of aviation engines, he manually cut a large number of aluminum cooling fins covered with fine longitudinal grooves on the bottom and sides of the battery compartment using a milling machine, and hammered out rows of diagonal ventilation grilles with labyrinth-like sand-blocking structures on the casing skin using a punch press.

The wind can pour in along the grilles to take away the heat of the fins, while the sand and dust all over the sky will lose kinetic energy under the collision of the labyrinth baffles and fall into the sand discharge groove at the bottom, never contaminating the internal circuits.

When the second version of the mechanism was undergoing extreme testing in the gravel test field, that proud backup foot end mechanical self-abandonment mechanism actually suffered three severe false triggers within just three days.

At that time, the G-Explorer was crossing a pile of large weathered rocks with an extremely high stepping frequency. When the foot end violently smashed toward the edge of an inclined rock at an instantaneous landing speed close to 2.5 m/s, the longitudinal dynamic acceleration shock wave generated instantly was directly conducted to the internal ratchet mechanism along the tibial tube, and its energy instantly broke through the mechanical friction threshold of the self-locking pin.

Before the G-Explorer broke a leg, it threw away its intact foot end and plunged headfirst into the rock pile barefoot.

Jiang Lin picked up the remains from the ground with a wry smile and returned to the workbench.

Re-deriving the impact dynamics waveform chart, he found that although the transient high-frequency acceleration peak generated by sharp impact was high, the duration was extremely short, usually within 1.5 milliseconds.

When mechanical leg breakage actually occurs, the displacement extrusion experienced by the connecting rod is a low-frequency, large-displacement signal with a duration greater than 15 milliseconds.

He found the solution key to the Physics world.

Recalculating the preload curve of the ratchet spring, he raised the trigger threshold by one gear.

More importantly, in the middle section of the trigger connecting rod, he delicately installed a mechanical low-pass filter composed of silicone pads and miniature disc springs.

This small filter could absorb and passivate all high-frequency transient shock waves of less than 3 milliseconds like a sponge absorbing water.

Only when subjected to fracture and extrusion signals with a long duration and large displacement would it completely transmit the force to the ratchet.

After this modification, the false trigger rate dropped directly to zero in subsequent thousands of kilometers of testing.

By the late autumn of the seventh year of the Wasteland, the wild wind outside the Stone House rolled the withered yellow Populus euphratica leaves spinning all over the ground.

The first fully functional full-size engineering prototype of the G-Explorer—[G-Explorer-A], finally stood on the red clay test field on the east side of the Stone House amidst the high-frequency howling of the brushless motor.

Its body size was a full circle larger than the original scrawny G-01, and its whole body exuded a wild, rugged, and extremely hardcore mechanical aesthetic.

The aluminum alloy pipe fittings of the fuselage skeleton were covered with fish-scale-like dark welds left by manual welding.

The sealed aluminum plates of the casing were purely hand-beaten on an abandoned anvil with a wooden mallet, leaving some minor unevenness and hammer marks on the edges.

At the joints of the six sturdy mechanical legs, large and small steel special fasteners were exposed in the air, and there was even no time to apply anti-rust paint on them.

But it is a living machine.

The moment Jiang Lin pressed the start button on the handheld terminal, it was accompanied by a powerful high-frequency hum of the brushless motor.

This mechanical life, which condensed his seven years of painstaking efforts, slowly unfolded its unique asymmetric six limbs.

The pneumatic push rod on the back made a powerful hiss, the towering multi-spectral sensor mast rose steadily, and the visual gimbal on the head began to turn left and right sensitively in the air like a vigilant hound.

Then it stepped out, and with a steady static gait, smoothly and step by step crossed a set of non-repetitive obstacle test gantries composed of sharp rocks and hollow stairs.

In the midwinter of the eighth year of the Wasteland, a rare extreme cold wave swept across this wilderness.

The temperature plummeted to minus twenty-five degrees within a few short hours, and the radioactive dust in the air formed tiny ice crystals.

Jiang Lin decided to execute an unprecedented whole-process closed-loop expedition simulation task for [G-Explorer-A].

He straddled the off-road motorcycle and firmly secured the G-Explorer-A, whose self-weight plus load reached the hundred-kilogram level, on the low-position transport rack at the rear of the motorcycle.

The motorcycle carried one person and one machine, braving the biting cold wind, and galloped towards the north-northwest direction.

After galloping for thirty kilometers, he pulled up the manual release valve.

The transport lock was unlocked.

The G-Explorer-A, which was originally in deep sleep, was instantly activated in the wind and snow.

The heating elements of its joint motors worked at high speed, raising the grease to the working temperature within five seconds.

Then it stretched its six limbs and slid from the bracket onto the hard permafrost layer.

Jiang Lin raised his hand and swiped out a brand-new area covering about twelve square kilometers on the terminal screen, the terrain of which had never been artificially marked.

"Go, bring back the geological spectrum data inside."

G - Explorer - A switched to [Exiting Exploration Mode].

Jiang Lin released a drone to observe.

This machine walked through the snow with unusual caution.

Every time it walked a certain distance, its tail would emit a crisp clang, dropping a radio relay candy crumb.

The relay props unfolded in the snow, drawing an invisible data cable across the vast white expanse.

Telemetry data showed that when driving to the edge of the dried-up riverbed at the fifth kilometer, G - Explorer - A's right front foot accidentally stepped on a huge pebble with dark ice on its surface.

The moment it planted its foot, the visual odometry suffered catastrophic feature point loss due to the specular reflection of the ice surface.

Because the pebble suddenly slid downward as a whole due to uneven force, the right front foot instantly endured a lateral shear impact as high as 1.6 times the rated load.

If it were an ordinary industrial quadruped robot, this blow would be enough to make the upper-layer controller throw an error and crash instantly.

But at that very instant, G - Explorer - A's underlying aperiodic state machine demonstrated a formidable dominance.

Without waiting for instructions from the upper-layer planner at all, the force-control closed-loop at the end of the tibia sensed the instantaneous loss of normal force and the surge of lateral force within 0.5 milliseconds.

Within 0.5 milliseconds, the algorithm interrupted the current tripod walking cycle, forced the remaining five legs to enter high-stiffness support, first unloaded the lateral overload of the right front leg, and then pulled the overall machine posture back into the safety cone within the next two hundred-plus milliseconds.

At the same time, the aperiodic reflection loop drove the stress-overloaded right front leg to slide passively and compliantly along the direction of the pebble's slide.

The entire machine carved an ugly yet unusually light arc across the surface, its body shaking violently a few times, surprisingly neutralizing all of this fatal impact force that was enough to snap a thigh. Its six legs bit hard into the ground again, preventing a rollover.

On the return trip, when reaching the strange stone ridge two kilometers away from the end, which was over 1,500 meters away from Jiang Lin, the long-term high-frequency and high-load impact finally triggered the fatal flaw hidden deep within the material.

The flexible spline of the harmonic reducer on the left rear leg, manufactured by quenching with waste engine oil, finally developed macroscopic penetration of micro-fatigue cracks at the grain boundaries after continuously crossing hundreds of high-frequency obstacles.

The bottom of the flexible spline cup completely fractured.

At that instant, when stepping to its highest point, the left rear leg instantly lost all rigidity, hanging limply in mid-air while the angle data returned by the joint encoder fell into a crazy infinite loop.

Far away, one kilometer away, Jiang Lin's handheld terminal screen instantly erupted with dazzling red high-frequency alarm characters.

[ALERT: DRIVE_UNIT_LEFT_REAR_CRITICAL_FAILURE! DETECTED MOTOR CURRENT OVERLOAD & OUT-OF-CONTROL!]

But he could not provide any physical rescue.

However, G - Explorer - A's master control watchdog ruthlessly executed the isolation logic 4 milliseconds after the failure occurred.

The high-voltage fuse forcibly cut off the power supply to the left rear leg, completely dismembering it.

Immediately afterward, the five-legged disability compensation gait, hidden inside the EEPROM for years, was instantly awakened and injected into the state machine.

G - Explorer - A did not fall down.

After losing active drive, the left rear leg was locked near the retraction angle by the fault isolation mechanism. It ultimately limped in a halting gait, bouncing violently up and down among the scattered rocks, stubbornly crawling step by step back toward Jiang Lin's location.

The wind and snow covered its aluminum-alloy body with a thin layer of white frost.

Accompanied by the final weary pant of the joint motor, G - Explorer - A rocked its body and stopped in front of the motorcycle transport rack.

It was home.

The autonomous mapping orthophoto of the full 24-kilometer route, the spectral analysis data of 42 sets of high-value scarce metal ruin outcrops, and the six unweathered primitive rock specimens neatly lying in the sample bay.

After the mission ended, all communication relay nodes sent back their final telemetry health packages.

Throughout the closed-loop expedition mission lasting more than seven hours, the absolute error of the navigation endpoint drift was strictly controlled within an astonishing forty-two meters.

Except for the fractured flexible spline on the left rear leg, this was an impeccable, comprehensive victory.

But this victory did not mean that G - Explorer - A had truly matured.

In the late spring of the ninth year, a rare electromagnetic storm swept across the Gobi Desert north of the Stone House.

At that time, G - Explorer was cutting into the exiting exploration mode on the open Gobi Desert.

The visual odometry first rapidly lost feature points due to a sudden sandstorm, and then the navigation software, according to preset logic, began to transfer the positioning weight from the visual odometry to the magnetic anomaly matching system.

The real problem arose at this very instant.

Due to long-term high-frequency vibration, the two sets of sensors had already accumulated a tiny zero-point bias on the underlying extrinsic calibration matrix.

This bias was usually hidden beneath the high weight of the visual odometry and was almost never exposed.

But when the visual weight plummeted and the magnetic anomaly matching weight was rapidly raised, this tiny radian-level error was continuously amplified by the Jacobian matrix, ultimately creating a false coordinate jump of more than thirty meters in the navigation coordinate system.

The main control chip instantly mistook that it had been laterally moved by thirty meters by some external force.

To correct this non-existent offset, the WBC algorithm drove the eighteen joint motors to erupt with ultimate torque in an instant, compelling the entire machine to launch a frantic lateral leap to the side, smashing the newly welded hydraulic mast against the hard rock and breaking it on the spot.

That night, Jiang Lin sat in front of the dilapidated prototype, gazing at the red error text filling the screen, sitting motionlessly in the Stone House until dawn.

Then he spent two months rewriting the online dynamic calibration program for the extrinsics of the entire sensor set.

He introduced the state self-calibration subroutine inside the Kalman Filtering, allowing the robot to automatically calibrate the relative geometric spatial matrix between vision, inertial navigation, and the magnetometer during walking by utilizing the instant every time the foot tip rested statically on the ground.

At the same time, he changed the upper-layer navigation switching logic from the previous crude hard switching to an elegant adaptive progressive weight smooth transition algorithm.

In the first few hundred meters where vision tended to deteriorate, the algorithm would gradually increase the fusion weight of the magnetometer at an extremely slow speed of one percent per second, while smoothly decaying the visual weight, eliminating the mathematical singularities and positioning jumps generated at the instant of coordinate system switching.

From the ninth year to the eleventh year, Jiang Lin brought this continuously repaired G - Explorer - A and ran dozens of real field expeditions continuously on the tens-of-kilometers-long purgatory route around the Stone House and toward the Skydome Station.

By the spring of the twelfth year, G - Explorer - A finally ushered in the end of its life.

Long-term overload operation and the baptism of harsh weather caused the interior of the aluminum alloy skeleton welds throughout its body to be filled with fatal intergranular corrosion and stress micro-cracks, and the metal fatigue of the flexible spline material had globally exceeded the limit lifespan of Physics design.

Jiang Lin had to personally completely dismantle this old partner that had accompanied him for five years inside the processing workshop.

Every brushless motor that could still be used and every intact encoder chip was carefully wiped clean and returned to the spare parts cabinet on the wall.

As for those worn-down foot modules with deep cuts, he classified them according to different wear levels and terrains, neatly stacking them in the innermost display rack of the Stone House as a Physics tribology database.

In these five years, every line of code traded with its body by the Type-A machine on the real Wasteland, every current fluctuation characteristic during slipping, and every drift curve of celestial navigation were completely extracted drop by drop by Jiang Lin and injected into the underlying algorithmic soul of the next-generation [G - Explorer - B].

In the winter of the thirteenth year of the Wasteland, the Type-B machine officially stepped down from the tooling rack.

Compared to the crude first generation, the design of G - Explorer - B moved toward an advanced stage of true intelligence and forward-looking synergy.

Jiang Lin reconstructed the following system, upgrading the originally rigidly fixed three-meter-wide movement corridor into an environment-aware adaptive corridor width control logic.

In the Type-B machine's system, the foot contact force state machine extracted the geomechanical characteristics of the current surface in real-time at high frequency.

Once it detected that the surface was transitioning from the hard Gobi Desert to a soft riverbed prone to vehicle trapping, G - Explorer - B would automatically send radio commands to the motorcycle, forcing the longitudinal following distance to adaptively stretch to eighty meters, and narrowing its own movement corridor to a high-security path narrow band with a width of only 1.5 meters strictly filtered by vision, no longer running around blindly.

More importantly, Jiang Lin truly realized the heaven-earth cooperative terrain pre-judgment module in the navigation decision-making chain of the Type-B machine.

Whenever G - Explorer - B detached from the formation and entered a completely unknown and complex geological black zone, it would no longer blindly step on it like the Type-A machine to realize it was slipping.

The small drone mounted on top of the fuselage would conduct forward-looking tactical reconnaissance at a high altitude about two hundred meters ahead of G - Explorer.

The multi-spectral camera on the drone high-speed bird's-eye photographed the terrain ahead, and within the airborne micro-edge processing chip, using the surface classification neural network pre-trained by Jiang Lin, it identified in advance which areas ahead belonged to sharp gravel beaches and which areas hid well-camouflaged quicksand gullies.

This miniature "Frontier Terrain Risk Cost Dynamic Map" would be sent in real-time via high-frequency radio to G - Explorer - B walking on the ground.

Three minutes before G - Explorer - B's own foot tips actually touched this dangerous ground, the chassis master control had already completed strategy adjustments in advance.

In advance, it lowered the virtual stiffness of the WBC controller and switched to a highly compliant flexible gait.

In advance, it notified the servo motor to increase low-speed torque output.

It even planned the route in advance, actively bypassing the fatal quicksand core areas marked out by the drone.

This cooperative model, which perfectly blended upper-layer active prediction with lower-layer aperiodic fault-tolerant reflection, was the ultimate wisdom that Jiang Lin exchanged in the wilderness of the Wasteland at the cost of countless painful lessons where he almost lost the machine.

At the end of the thirteenth year of the Wasteland, G - Explorer - B successfully completed an ultra-long-distance collaborative formation field actual test.

That was an expedition with a total length of over ninety kilometers.

Along the entire route, the motorcycle transport-carrying section was as long as sixty-three kilometers, while G - Explorer - B accompanied on foot, and its cumulative independent walking mileage for independently exploring high-risk ruin piles and crossing deep valley gullies reached an astonishing twenty-seven kilometers.

Running through the entire journey of more than ninety kilometers, under harsh meteorological conditions of flying dark-red sand and dust and local strong magnetic interference, the number of losses of the following system composed of infrared vision and UWB was zero.

The autonomous exploration mode conducted short-range actual tests lasting several hours in three ruins left by the pre-civilization.

G - Explorer - B not only successfully avoided two sudden internal local collapses, but also, while out of contact and relying on a tenacious struggle with geomagnetic anomaly matching and inertial navigation, independently planned a reverse escape route, carrying high-value ruin material specimens, safely walked out of the ruin exit, and perfectly rendezvoused with Jiang Lin waiting outside.

By the end of the fourteenth to fifteenth year of the Wasteland.

All core subsystems and all modular building blocks under the G - Explorer project completely accomplished engineering verification without any blind spots on this hostile and uncertain Real World.

This technical achievement, which had gone through fifteen years of vicissitudes and was irrigated by countless scrap iron and code patches, was finally organized, packaged, and compressed by Jiang Lin into the heaviest technical crystallization in the history of the Low Entropy Workshop.

[G - Explorer _ Engineering _ Infrastructure _ Package _ v1.0].

Inside this super engineering data packet of dozens of gigabytes lay the C++ hardcore pseudo-code of the cooperative following control state machine with extremely high mathematical robustness after experiencing the baptism of high-frequency electromagnetic interference.

It was the predictive degradation mathematical model of foot material friction and wear under different surface characteristics, tempered using tens of thousands of Physics samples in real high-friction, large-undulation unstructured terrain.

It was the passive comprehensive navigation firmware that seamlessly replicated heterogeneous data fusion between drones and ground multi-legged robots via factor graphs.