Rhoda AI robots recover from mid-task mishaps in a factory demonstration
In a visit with Mike Schroepfer, Rhoda AI showed robots fixing mistakes while unpacking parts, and its CEO targets paid production deployments before the end of 2026.
Rhoda AI has shown how its robots cope when a job goes off script. In a Field Trips with Schrep visit, Mike Schroepfer joined founder and CEO Jagdeep Singh to watch two-armed robots unpack a 10 kg box of ball bearings, empty it into a metal tote and sort the waste. When the gripper picked up a bearing along with the paper, it put the bearing back and grasped the paper again. It also found crumpled paper added to the tote and pulled paper out of an upside-down plastic bag. In a second task, the robot moved automotive radar units from a conveyor to an inspection fixture and adjusted its grasp when Singh changed a unit's position.
The system predicts a short run of future video frames, and a separate model turns that prediction into arm movements. It starts from pre-training on hundreds of millions of video clips. Singh says a new task needs 10 to 20 hours of teleoperation data. Inference runs in the cloud, while low-level control stays on the robot.
Why it matters
Factory work rarely follows a perfect script, so recovering from small errors matters as much as the first attempt. Still, this was a guided visit, and it does not prove steady reliability over long shifts. Rhoda aims for paid production deployments on wheeled robots before the end of 2026, but has not said which customers or how often a human must step in. Watch for results across changing materials and customer sites, and how the cloud link holds up when the network drops.
