Here's how cloud agents are improving production robot performance today.
(Side note: I love these
@AmbiRobotics blog posts. Ambi is one of the few production robotics companies willing to go deep on its technical work in public.)
One problem that Ambi noticed for their sorting robots is that some packages barely fit the bag opening. Deformable shapes or sensor noise can cause the robot to misjudge the package size, so it can place them in the wrong orientation. This means the package doesn't fit, the task fails, and the system has to retry. Ambi estimates that this costs about 31,000 sorts per year.
Obviously, solving these failure modes is highly attractive; reducing 31,000 extra sorts creates significant value through faster throughput. Unfortunately, engineers still need weeks to analyze failures, propose fixes, and test them.
Instead, if Ambi can plug AI coding agents into the loop, they can iterate much faster.
So they built the AmbiOS Agentic Robotics Harness. The agents don't solve the problem by writing arbitrary code. Instead, they can edit a bounded computation graph composed of existing robot skills. This means the agents can move quickly while still keeping safety checks and error handling intact.
The harness gives the agents two key pieces of infrastructure:
1) A cloud dataset of real production events, filterable by known success and failure modes
2) A simulator that replays those events with the agent's proposed changes
So the agents pull failures → hypothesize → edit the skill graph → test in sim → ship to a production A/B test.
In their experiment, these agents proposed three candidate fixes in just 10 hours. Of the three, one added 4.2 packages per hour, about 15k more sorts per robot per year, and now runs on 30% of Ambi's U.S. fleet.
I love how simple yet powerful this harness is. I think every robotics company with robotics in production should strive to accomplish such a loop.