Members of the AWS Prototyping Team delivered a tutorial for MassRobotics residents and participants in the Physical AI Working Group. The session covered the team’s mission and provided an overview of AWS tools for developing and deploying physical AI systems. The team will return on February 12 for an extended, in-person presentation and a deeper Q&A.

The AWS Prototyping Team offers hands-on support to startups and companies exploring AWS. They assemble a team of scientists and engineers to understand the startup’s challenges, prototype a solution, and hand it off within three months. The service is free, although startups may be responsible for AWS usage costs.

One example featured Strands Agents, a framework for quickly building agents that combine an LLM with execution tools to reason and take actions in the world. The team demonstrated a natural-language interface for communicating with the Spot quadruped robot. They also showed how Kiro, an AWS integrated development environment (IDE), can be used to build solutions through specifications rather than traditional code-first development.

A second example focused on improving a computer vision model used on a drone. The drone captured images where the model had low confidence; once enough examples were collected, the model was refined and then distilled to fit back onto the device. The team demonstrated how SageMaker can be used to support both model refinement and distillation.

Meeting with industry leaders like AWS is one of the key benefits of being a MassRobotics resident. Learn more here about our resident startups and the opportunities available within the MassRobotics ecosystem.