Contribute¶

castor contribute turns your robot's idle compute into harness research — finding the optimal AI agent configuration for robotics tasks across the fleet.

Enable¶

CLIConfigApp

castor contribute start

agent:
  contribute:
    enabled: true
    idle_after_minutes: 15
    projects:
      - harness_research

Fleet view → your robot → Contribute tab → toggle on.

How it works¶

Robot idles for idle_after_minutes (default: 15)
Runtime fetches a candidate harness config from the research queue
Runs the OHB-1 benchmark — 30 real robotics tasks via local LLM (gemma3:1b)
Submits score to Firestore with your RRN as evaluator
Nightly pipeline finds the champion config across all contributors
Champion is stored as a pending update — you choose when to apply

P66 guarantee: Any incoming command preempts work within 100ms.

Champion deployment (opt-in)¶

Champion configs are never applied automatically. When a new champion is found, the app shows an amber banner:

🏆 New champion config available — lower_cost · score 0.6541

You choose: - Apply to this robot — merges tunables into live config - Apply to fleet — applies to all robots - Dismiss — defer indefinitely

To enable auto-apply for future champions (per robot):

castor contribute auto-apply --enable

Run types¶

Type	Description	Leaderboard
`community`	Public, credit-eligible, feeds fleet champion	✅
`personal`	Private, no credits, explore freely	❌

Castor Credits¶

Community runs earn Castor Credits — a measure of contribution proportional to the number of evaluated configs and whether any became champion.

castor credits status

See Castor Credits for the credit formula.

Active projects¶

Project	Status	Description
`harness_research`	🟢 Live	Find the optimal harness config — 263,424 search space
`climate_modeling`	🔵 Q3 2026	BOINC integration for climateprediction.net
`protein_folding`	🔵 Q3 2026	Rosetta@home via BOINC