What Seyd is
Seyd puts a person at the controls of a machine anywhere on the internet. Video, sensors and commands go from the robot to the operator’s browser over one direct, encrypted QUIC connection. You keep your robot, your camera, your control software and your operator UI. Seyd is the connection between them.
Three parties, one of them ours
Section titled “Three parties, one of them ours”Your robot runs a small program. If the camera already publishes RTSP or
RTP on a socket, that program is the seydd daemon and a TOML file. If your
own process holds the encoded frames, it is one of the SDKs. Either way it
announces the robot to the cloud, listens for pilots, and forwards what your
encoder produced.
Your operator opens a web page in Chrome or Edge. One element,
<seyd-video>, connects, decodes and paints the feed. The same session
delivers sensor messages to your page and carries commands back to the robot.
The Seyd cloud knows who is online and who may connect. It verifies the robot’s key and the pilot’s session token, brokers the session, and reports what it learned about the network. On a direct session it never sees a byte of video.
Only the cloud is ours, and even that is optional: it is a plain container on Postgres, runs in the EU today, and you can run it yourself. See Run the cloud yourself.
Direct first. The relay last, and always shown
Section titled “Direct first. The relay last, and always shown”The pilot races every address the robot announced: its LAN address, a port-mapped address, its public address, IPv6. The first that answers wins, and the session runs on it. That race runs first, every time.
Only when the race fails, and only if the robot allows it, does the pilot
attach to the WebSocket relay on the signal server. A relayed session is never
hidden. <seyd-video> keeps an amber RELAY badge up for as long as it lasts,
the HUD’s path line reads RELAY via cloud with the reason the direct path
failed next to it, and the guidance box stays on screen headed “Relayed
through the Seyd cloud”. The relay is the symptom of a network problem, not its
cure: it adds a hop and a TCP leg, and it is metered and priced separately.
The decision and its reasoning are in ADR 0010. What to change on the router or the SIM so the direct path works is in Reachability.
No transcoding
Section titled “No transcoding”Seyd forwards your camera’s own encoded bytes. The agent may depacketize RTP and split a picture into chunks; it never decodes, re-encodes or inspects the payload beyond that. Quality is whatever your encoder produces, privacy is structural, and the latency stack has nothing in it but your encoder, the browser’s decoder, the speed of light and a presentation budget you set.
Adaptation follows the same rule. When the link narrows, Seyd asks your publisher for less, and where the publisher offers several encodings of the same picture, Seyd switches to another one instead of changing the video.
What Seyd is and is not
Section titled “What Seyd is and is not”| Seyd provides | Seyd does not provide |
|---|---|
| Peer-to-peer video tunnel | The camera or video encoder |
| Sensor data channels | The sensors or sensor fusion |
| Command channels with driver/observer roles | The control algorithms or autopilot |
| Vehicle discovery and fleet presence | The vehicle hardware |
| Session authentication and authorization | The operator UI (except optional SDK components) |
| Connection-quality hooks and closed-loop rate control | The fleet management business logic |
| Reachability diagnosis when P2P is impossible | Managed human operators |
| Relay as the last resort (metered, always shown) | Transcoding or format conversion |
| The real-time plane: video, commands, sensor streams | Bulk transfer: mission plans, logs, software updates |
Seyd exposes SDKs and APIs. You build the robot side and the operator application on top.
Where next
Section titled “Where next”- Concepts: the words the rest of the docs use.
- Choose a form factor: daemon, Python, C or Rust.
- Quickstart: drive the public demo robot from a page of your own.