Greenfield deployment

A greenfield deployment is a robot deployment at a new facility designed from inception to accommodate the robot. Distinct from brownfield deployment (retrofitting robots into an existing site designed for human workers). Greenfield sites can optimize lighting, floor flatness, dock heights, and signage for robot perception; brownfield sites cannot.

The distinction matters because greenfield vs brownfield is a major axis in evaluating humanoid program viability. A robot working in a greenfield facility designed around it is making a weaker claim about general-purpose capability than one working in unmodified brownfield. Most current Atlas, Apollo, and Digit deployments at named operator sites are brownfield. That's the harder test. Amazon's robotic-fulfillment-center buildout (2018-onwards) is largely greenfield. The honest framing on a deployment milestone is which type it is.