What process mining does for robotics
Search "process mining" and "robots" together and you'll mostly find robotic process automation — software bots clicking through enterprise UIs. That is not this.
We mean physical robots. Arms, AMRs, mobile manipulators. Fleets that move real goods across real floors, running perception, planning, and control loops that make thousands of decisions a minute.
Robots have A process problem
In a robot stack, the process is emergent. There is no diagram of how a pick flows through perception, planning, traffic management, and execution. And there’s no diagram because nobody designed that flow as a whole. And not only that; it changes when you update a model, add a robot, or rearrange the racking. Ask three engineers to draw it and you'll get three diagrams, all reasonable, none checked against reality.
Meanwhile, the fleet emits more behavioral data than any ERP or enterprise system ever will. Every decision leaves a trace. Today that trace sits unread in rosbags.
What process mining does for a robot fleet
Three things, in order:
Discovery. Recover the actual process from the behavior your fleet already emits. The process that's really running, across robots, across vendors, across the systems that coordinate them.
Conformance. Check execution against that recovered model, so drift is visible when it starts, not next week after it becomes a throughput number.
Root cause. When behavior diverges, trace the divergence through the process, not through a grep. "Show me where this run left the model" is a shorter investigation than "search six terabytes for something unusual."
None of this makes your robots smarter on its own. It collapses the loop that makes them smarter. You can't fix, retrain, or trust what you can't measure.
Thirty years old, and brand new
Process mining is not our invention. It's a thirty-year-old discipline with textbooks, conferences, and a decacorn category leader. A handful of academic papers have gestured at applying it to robotics and concluded the same thing we did: the fit is obvious.
So we've done it. Mushroom is the first process mining platform for robotics: process discovery, conformance checking, and root cause analysis, recovered from the data your fleet already produces.
If you run a fleet and have never seen its actual process, we should talk.