> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://documentation.orbitdev.org/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Research and development

> Orbit's research program turns broad ambition into small, testable questions. Research is most useful when a result can be reproduced, compared with a baseline, and used to make a decision.

Orbit's research program should turn broad ambition into small, testable questions. Research is most useful when a result can be reproduced, compared with a baseline, and used to make a decision.

## 12.1 Research themes

**Model efficiency.** Investigate ways to improve quality per unit of compute, memory, and latency.

**Tool reliability.** Study how models select tools, handle malformed results, recover from errors, and avoid repeated unsafe actions.

**Context management.** Explore retrieval, summarization, project memory, and methods for reducing irrelevant context.

**Evaluation.** Develop task-specific test sets and repeatable evaluation pipelines, including failure analysis rather than only aggregate scores.

**Multimodal systems.** If pursued, test how models combine text with images, audio, video, or spatial information, and document the limitations of each modality.

**Human-AI interaction.** Evaluate whether people can understand, correct, and supervise the system effectively.

**Robotics and embodied AI.** Explore simulation-first methods and tightly constrained physical experiments only when the required expertise and safety infrastructure are available.

## 12.2 Experiment discipline

Each experiment should record a question, hypothesis, baseline, configuration, data version, metrics, results, and interpretation. Negative results are useful when they eliminate a weak approach or reveal a hidden failure mode.

Research artifacts should have versioned configurations and, where licensing and privacy permit, enough detail for another engineer to reproduce the result. A demo video is useful communication, but it is not a reproducibility package.

## 12.3 Research gates

Before a research result becomes a product feature, it should pass relevant gates:

* The behavior is repeatable under defined conditions.
* The expected benefit is measurable.
* Failure modes are understood well enough for the proposed use.
* Security and privacy implications have been reviewed.
* User-facing claims match the evaluation evidence.
* Monitoring and rollback plans exist for production deployment.


This documentation is built and hosted on [Mintlify](https://mintlify.com), a developer documentation platform.