Agency Tool Company wants to make OTA software updates easier

ATC Deploy ships software to robots wherever they are. | Source: Agency Tool Company

Jack Morrison and Davis Foster, co-founders of Scythe Robotics, today launched Agency Tool Co. The new startup seeks to build fast, reliable infrastructure for robotics developers.

Since leaving Scythe around a year ago, Morrison said he and Foster stayed busy getting a feel for how the robotics landscape has changed. “I wanted to see what’s out there and get my hands dirty building again,” Morrison told The Robot Report.

Morrison said he found that, during his eight years at Scythe, many companies were struggling with the same problems that Scythe struggled with. It reminded him of the years he had spent wishing there was a vendor out there that understood the unique challenges that come with robotics and could then actually meet those needs.

“It’s all the same problems,” he said. “We worked with a handful of companies, in mostly technical areas, some in leadership coaching, and saw everybody struggling with exactly the same challenges that we had struggled with at Scythe.”

The robotics industry has matured in the past few years. The AI boom brought a host of new companies and funding into the industry. Meanwhile, more established robotics companies are ready to scale. This created an ideal landscape for Agency Tool Co.’s first offering, ATC Deploy, according to Morrison.

“Today, we hear a lot in robotics about this kind of zeitgeist around deploying robots and getting robots in the field,” he said. “You need to learn from robots in the field, but ultimately, you can’t do that if you’re bottlenecked on how you put the software out there.”

OTA updates are still a hurdle for the robotics industry

ATC Deploy us designed to work with any kind of deployment strategy or application architecture. | Source: Agency Tool Company

ATC Deploy ships software to robots wherever they are today. The system works with the software and architecture customers are already using, said Agency Tool Co. Customers can continue using their own operating system image, docker Open Container Initiative (OCI) images, and any file or directory tree.

Morrison said the team started with robot software deployment because he saw it as a real bottleneck for the industry. However, many people outside of the industry assumed that it was a solved problem.

“Installing software is something that everyone does. People do that 10 times a week. You put a new app on your iPhone. You download something on Windows, or you update Chrome,” Morrison said. “But when it comes to robots, there really isn’t a tool that’s made to make it easy.”

Morrison said he knows firsthand from his days at Scythe how many things can go wrong when trying to push new software onto an existing system.

“Today, you’ve got to manage a whole host of scripts to copy the software onto the machine to change which version is running, to manage restarting the software when you do ship a new version, to validate that it didn’t get corrupted when it was transferring, and that’s just with one robot sitting in front of you,” he said. “You scale that out to tens, hundreds, or thousands of machines, and it becomes a problem.”

Agency Tool Co. hopes to help with flaky connections

ATC Deploy allows users to push updates to robots anywhere, whether the robots are underwater or right in front of them. | Source: Agency Tool Company

Robots deployed beyond warehouses and factories may not always have access to a clear Wi-Fi connection, noted Agency Tool Co.

“Many of them might be on a straw-like LTE connection or 3G connection,” Morrison said. “There are some undersea robotics folks who literally send communications to their robots over sonar because they’re underwater, or satellites that have connections that are measured in bits, not megabits.”

A flaky connection means resource availability on that device could be limited, or even entirely unreachable at certain parts of the day.

“Robots also turn off at random times that you can’t control,” said Morrison. “So, if your update relies on the machine being online for hours at a time, you’re probably out of luck.”

ATC Deploy also acts as the first building block for Agency Tool Co.’s plans.

“It allows us to provide value to our customers, help get more robots in the field, and then build this platform and this system of record of what the robots are and what they’re doing,” Morrison said. “That can help our customers move faster and have information that they’ve had to piecemeal together the entire time.”

The system can also help those who are working on their very first robots.

“We’re solving the problem not only for those folks who have scaled fleets already out in the field,” Morrison said. “If you have one robot that is sitting in front of you, and you are an undergraduate in robotics, and you just want to install your first ROS application onto that, we want to make it one click or one command line run to ship the software on there and get it running.”

Burro, Tempo, and Gather AI are launch partners

Agency Tool Co.’s launch partners are all building robots for different industries. Burro has hundreds of robots working in agriculture and other outdoor environments. Gather AI operates warehouse inventory drones. Meanwhile, Tempo is starting to deploy grinding machines at customer sites.

“It’s been interesting to see how they work and see their developer workflows,” Morrison said. “Every robotics company has a slightly different expectation of their workflow, but it all rhymes.”

Most companies go through a similar progression through a lab phase, then a phase of bringing the robot into the field, and then scaling. “The three partners we’re working with are really at three different phases in that journey,” Morrison said.

Tempo is in the early stages, mostly working in its office and with a handful of robots in the field. On the other end of the spectrum is Burro, which has more than 750 robots out in the field.

Despite these differences, Morrison said they care about the same things: They want to know how to minimize bandwidth or how to adopt new software without having to change the architecture of the entire system.

Agency Tool Co. targets validation

ATC Deploy interface from Agency Tool Co.

ATC Deploy is the first building block in the company’s plans for its platform. | Source: Agency Tool Company

Morrison said the next bottleneck the company wants to address is validation. It has plans to eventually roll out ATC Build, which will give teams the ability to build and test systems with a one-line change.

“We’re already looking at basically giving developers cloud-type access to embedded compute that they would use in their robots that today, they have to build and host themselves. We’re primarily focused on making that available for continuous integration,” Morrison said. “We’ll be hosting the embedded boards ourselves and have a cloud-side application that plugs into their continuous integration systems to make it easy for them to launch apps on that.”

Morrison said he expects to continue taking on early customers for ATC Deploy, with a full rollout coming in the next few months. From there, ATC Build will build on top of the company’s work on ATC Deploy.

“There’s a lot of diversity in how folks want to work, but we’re building these core building blocks that they can put together with their own special sauce sprinkled on top,” Morrison said. “We do 98% of the work, and just that last little step that fits into their workflow is on them.”