Protos Docs Try Protos

Protos is Aris Machina's AI-native R&D workspace for designing and industrializing complex physical systems. It connects first-principles models, experiments, and institutional knowledge into a single, traceable environment — from concept through manufacturing handoff.

Getting Started

The Co-Engineer can help throughout your workflow. It can create schemas, populate data documents, build canvases, and search the Knowledge Library — all from a chat. Use it as much or as little as you like alongside the features directly.

Go to protos.arismachina.com and tell Protos what you want to create — this creates your first project and kicks off guided onboarding.
From that description, the Co-Engineer works through five steps, one per turn — a starter schema, a data document from it, an entry in the Knowledge Library, a guided stop at the Models Library, and a starter canvas in Simulation Studio.
After the five steps, onboarding hands off to the general-purpose Co-Engineer so you can keep building or adjust anything it set up.

Project Overview

A Project is your central workspace in Protos. It brings together all artifacts related to a design or R&D campaign — designs, test data, simulations, models, and decisions — in a single, connected canvas.

Key Concepts

Concept	Description
Canvas	A graph of connected blocks (parameters, inputs, calculations, models, visualizations). Data flows through the chain automatically.
Traceability	Field values created by the Co-Engineer link back to the Knowledge Library source they came from.
PSPP	The reasoning framework underlying Protos: Process → Structure → Property → Performance.

Creating a Project

Setup runs as a short wizard — Name → Details → Data → Configure — and once the project exists you can click any step in the progress bar to jump back to it. Your progress is saved, so a setup you leave part-way through picks up where you stopped.

Click Create new project. Add a name and description.
Details — answer a few questions about the project, one at a time. Each is generated from your name and description, with clickable suggested answers you can take or type over. The first — "What are you trying to achieve in this project?" — sets the goal. Later questions are marked (optional) and have a Skip button, and Skip in the footer moves past the whole step.
Data — optionally bring in what you already have, grouped into three panels: BOM, Materials & supplier data, and Simulation & design candidates. Each panel's Ingest data menu takes files From device, From SharePoint, or From GitHub, or pulls in existing Knowledge library documents and Data documents. Leave any panel empty to skip it. A drop zone at the bottom takes any other supporting documents.
Configure — the Co-Engineer sets up your workspace and drafts a kickoff plan from everything you gave it. You land on the new project with the plan waiting as a pill in the chat: Run it as drafted, Edit it first, or dismiss it and start on your own.

Finding an Existing Project

The project switcher in the header — click your current project's name — is available from every page. At the bottom of it, click Browse all projects (only shown while its search box is empty) to open the full project library, where you can:

Filter by Mine, Shared with me, Public, or All, with live counts on each tab
Search by name, description, tags, or domain
See which project is currently active (marked Active with a highlighted border) and set another one active
Open a project, or as its owner, upload a cover image or Delete it
On the Public tab, clone an Aris-published example project as a starting point

Navigating the Canvas

Action	How
Zoom in/out	Scroll or pinch — inspect blocks or see the full picture
Open a block	Click it to view its properties, inputs, and results
Filter	Filter bar: parameter, Data input, calculation, model, or visualization
Search	Search across all blocks by name

Features at a Glance

Schemas

Define the structure of your engineering data. Instead of disconnected spreadsheets, schemas give every artifact a consistent, queryable shape — reusable across all projects and connectable to external tools.

Use schemas for: designs, test data, model parameterizations, operating conditions, and data extracted from external files via the Co-Engineer.

→ Schemas guide

Data Studio

Your workbench for managing and comparing design data before running a simulation. Pick a schema, select which data documents to activate, and the canvas picks them up automatically. Includes side-by-side comparison, inline editing, and charting across document variants.

→ Data Studio guide

Simulation Studio

Build and run calculation canvases — connect your data to models and calculations, and see results update automatically. Supports Python calculations, external models, parameter sweeps, and in-canvas visualization.

→ Simulation Studio guide

Model Library

A registry of all computational models in your workspace — physics models, ML models, kinetic models, and custom scripts. Register once, reuse across any project, with full version history.

→ Models Library guide

Knowledge Library

Protos's institutional memory. Every decision, data point, and reference is captured and linked to the design artifacts that used it — so nothing is lost between projects or team members.

What lives here: academic papers, internal reports, decisions and rationale, experimental results, AI-surfaced connections.

→ Knowledge Library guide

Co-Engineer

An AI assistant available across all features. It accelerates work by structuring data, configuring simulations, and surfacing connections that would otherwise take hours to find manually — always with traceable sources.

→ Co-Engineer guide

MCP Connections

Connect external tools — e.g. Notion, Linear, or Sentry — to the Co-Engineer. Once connected, the Co-Engineer can use those tools directly in chat without you switching tabs. Found under Integrations in the sidebar, not as a top-level page.

→ MCP Connections guide

A cross-cutting capability, not a page of its own — share canvases, schemas, data documents, models, and Co-Engineer chats from each resource's own Share dialog. Two sharing roles: Editor (can co-edit in place, on some resource types) and Viewer (read-only). The resource creator is always the owner. Organise teammates into teams or share with your whole community. Publications is a separate feature that lets you publish canvases as interactive snapshots for external stakeholders.

→ Collaboration & Sharing guide

Versioning

Schemas, canvases, models, data documents, and knowledge documents all keep a version history — view past versions and restore one if a change turns out to be wrong.

→ Versioning guide

Integrations

Integrations are accessible from the Integrations section in the left sidebar.

System	What Protos does
Onshape	Connect your own Onshape account and give the Co-Engineer CAD tools — search your documents, inspect geometry, and build it
SharePoint / OneDrive	Browse and import files into the Co-Engineer for data extraction
GitHub	Register computational models (Python, scripts) from a repo into the Models Library
MCP servers	Connect external tools to the Co-Engineer so it can use them directly in chat
Register a Model	Register external computational models into the Model Library

Note: GitHub is for model registration only — not for importing data into schemas. See Model Library for details.

Your Account

Click your name or avatar at the bottom of the left sidebar and choose Billing & Usage. Alongside your plan and usage, that page holds your account settings:

Card	What you can do
Display name	Set or change the name shown across the app — in the user menu, on your avatar, and anywhere your work is attributed. The card tells you the current one, and the button reads Change name (or Set name if you haven't set one).
Password	Change password. Accounts that sign in with Google don't have one to change, and the card says so instead.
Email preferences	Turn Marketing emails on or off. Account emails — sign-in, security, and billing notices — are always sent.

The same page has a Danger Zone for deleting your account.

Glossary Quick Reference

Term	Definition
Canvas	The visual graph workspace connecting all project nodes
Design freeze	The point at which a validated design is locked for handoff — achieved in Protos by publishing a canvas snapshot
Node	A block on the canvas — parameter, input, calculation, model, or visualization
PSPP	Process → Structure → Property → Performance
Schema	A defined structure for a type of engineering data
Sweep	A batch simulation run across a parameter space
TRL	Technology Readiness Level — Protos is optimized for TRL 0–3
Trace	The ability to follow any value back to its original source

→ Full Glossary

Maintained by Aris Machina