SPINE: Bridging the Cyber-Physical Gap with Agentic AI
TL;DR
Results show that structured agentic debugging can address a key cyber-physical integration bottleneck in real-world robot deployment, and are shown to be more complete and efficient recovery than human operators using Claude Code.
Abstract
Foundation models give robots powerful high-level reasoning, yet turning that intelligence into reliable physical action remains difficult: roboticists must still align device drivers, network interfaces, sensors, controllers, and safety constraints for each platform. This often-overlooked integration layer acts as the robot's spinal cord, translating high-level intent into coordinated physical behavior, and remains a primary bottleneck for scalable Embodied AI. Hence, we propose SPINE (Scalable Physical Integration with ageNtic Expertise), an agentic framework for systematically debugging and deploying bimanual robots for teleoperation. SPINE centers on two subagent-driven workflows: a profile builder that compiles robot-specific context and a debugger that uses that context to iterate through diagnosis, repair, and validation until teleoperation succeeds. Across two bimanual robot platforms and 12 debugging scenarios, novice-operated SPINE achieved more complete and efficient recovery than human operators using Claude Code. On DOBOT X-Trainer, SPINE improved success from 76% to 100% and reduced mean time-to-teleoperation by 30\%; on AgileX PiPER, SPINE also achieved 100\% success and reduced mean time-to-teleoperation by 38%. These results show that structured agentic debugging can address a key cyber-physical integration bottleneck in real-world robot deployment.
