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 also maintaining code quality. With a distributed development team that used complex robotics software, the company deployed CodeRabbit’s AI-powered code review platform to improve the speed of shipping code. With CodeRabbit, code quality and dev productivity for their autonomous navigation and control systems greatly improved, 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 but can also consume up to 30% of senior developer time, significantly slowing down feature development velocity.

• The code for robotics algorithms and safety-critical systems requires experienced software developers for thorough review.

• The robotics development team was small, and resources were limited thus, the review process was a bottleneck.

• Bugs caught in production resulted in costly downtime and safety issues, which were very hard to fix when the robots were deployed in remote locations.

• Typos and small errors slip through in large PRs

• No proper error handling introduces hard-to-detect bugs

• Feedback is delayed during busy development cycles

  Improving Dev Productivity with AI Code Reviews

  Agora Robotics deployed CodeRabbit’s AI code 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 when it comes to merging code into the "main branch". Those rules sometimes introduced bugs that would appear early in the manual review but sometimes they would only appear in QA when triggering that specific part of the code. 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 the bugs all at the review stage.

  Key Features Used:

  Automated Code Analysis:

  • Real-time AI analysis of complex robotics algorithms and streamlining workflows by eliminating tedious manual tasks

  • Generate sequence diagrams, make it easier to see how new features fit into the system

  • Robotics-specific code patterns and potential issues are detected

Collaboration Features:

• 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 that refine error handling and overall code robustness.

  • Adaptive learning: Leverage team comments and tailor AI recommendations to fit project-specific best practices.

These combined capabilities ensure that CodeRabbit not only enhances code quality but also accelerates development workflows. They also found the Sequence Diagrams generated by CodeRabbit to be 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.

Results and Impact:

• Reduction in code review time by at least 20%

• Fewer PR iterations, speed up the development cycle

• Decrease in production bug incidents

• Knowledge transfer across the team and AI feedback on best practices help better coding habits overall

• Improved documentation coverage across the codebase

• Enhanced ability 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 standards of code quality and safety." — 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

Let us help your development team see the power of AI-driven code reviews. Setup takes less than 5 minutes, and no credit card is required. Begin Your Free Trial today and see how CodeRabbit can transform your development workflow. Questions? Our support team is ready to assist.