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.”

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.”