Agora Robotics & CodeRabbit: AI-Powered Code Reviews Streamline Robotics Software

At a Glance:
Primary contact: Paul Popescu, CEO and Ioana Calen, COO
Primary technology: Python, C++
Challenge: Manual code reviews are a bottleneck in the development of critical robotics software

Agora Robotics, a leading provider of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) for warehouse automation, struggled to maintain software development velocity while maintaining code quality. With a distributed development team that used complex robotics software, the company deployed CodeRCodeRabbit'sowered code review platform to improve the speed of shipping code—with CodeRabbit, code quality and dev productivity for their autonomous navigation and control systems significantly enhanced, allowing the team to focus more on innovation while consistently upholding the highest standards of code quality and safety.

Key Challenges: Small team struggles to ship features at the speed of customer demands

Manual code reviews are time-consuming and inconsistent, often consuming up to 30% of a senior developer's time, which significantly slows down feature development velocity. The code for robotics algorithms and safety-critical systems demands experienced software developers for a thorough review. The robotics development team was small, and resources were limited; consequently, the review process became a bottleneck. Bugs caught in production resulted in costly downtime and safety issues, making fixes difficult when the robots were deployed in remote locations. Typos and minor errors can slip through in large PRs. Inadequate error handling introduces hard-to-detect bugs. Feedback can be delayed during busy development cycles.

Improving Dev Productivity with AI Code Reviews

Agora Robotics deployed CodeRabbit'sode review solution for robotics. The onboarding was done in less than one business day, and it took less than another business day to integrate the solution into their existing GitHub workflow and receive helpful AI code review recommendations. Their codebase in GitHub has specific rules for merging code into the "main” branch." Tho”e rules sometimes introduced bugs that would appear early in the manual review. Still, sometimes, they only appear in QA when a specific part of the code is triggered. This would slow down their testing process as it would need a new PR to be created, reviewed, and merged with fixes. With CodeRabbit, they can avoid this scenario and catch all the bugs at the review stage.

Key Features Used:

CodeRabbit not only offers a fresh perspective on your code—improving it through clean code principles and fostering new habits for cleaner, more maintainable code—but also boosts collaboration through a suite of powerful features:

• Cross-team code review coordination: Seamlessly manage reviews without waiting for individual engineer availability.

• Automated documentation: Simplify understanding of critical code functionality with AI-generated insights.

• CI/CD and DevOps integration: Implement improvements quickly through smooth pipeline integration.

• Enhanced safety checks: Benefit from suggestions refining error handling and code robustness.

• Adaptive learning: Leverage team comments and tailor AI recommendations to fit project-specific best practices. Automated Code Analysis: Real-time AI analysis of complex robotics algorithms while streamlining workflows by eliminating tedious manual tasks.

• Sequence diagrams: Generate to illustrate clearly how new features integrate into the system.

These combined capabilities ensure that CodeRabbit enhances code quality and accelerates development workflows. They also found the Sequence Diagrams generated by CodeRabbit useful, especially in the case of feature PRs when lots of new "strings" get attached to their system. Also, the fact that CodeRabbit learns from their comments made the AI take user feedback into account for the next time the same code block comes up. They found the chat feature to be a nice touch, detecting robotics-specific code patterns and potential issues.

Results and Impact:

Reduction of code review time by at least 20%. Fewer PR iterations accelerate the development cycle. Decrease in production bug incidents. Knowledge transfer within the team and AI feedback on best practices enhance overall coding habits. Improved documentation coverage across the codebase. Enhanced capacity to meet rapid deployment schedules.

"CodeRabbit has transformed our development process by providing intelligent, automated code reviews that understand the complexities of robotics software. Our team can now focus on innovation while maintaining the highest code quality and safety standards." — Paul Popescu, CEO of Agora Robotics.

Conclusion:

CodeRabbit's successful deployment at Agora Robotics shows what is possible when AI code reviews are applied to highly technical domains. The platform's ability to understand and validate complex robotic code while maintaining the highest safety standards has proven extremely valuable to its development team.

Start Your Journey with CodeRabbit

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