Tell the Robot What You Want — Sandhya Subramani, AWS
Aug 29, 2026 · 17:23
Sandhya Subramani of AWS demonstrates Scout, a Raspberry Pi rover using the open-source Strands Agents framework, arguing that an agent layer lets robots handle natural-language requests beyond their trained policies. She shows Scout answering an untrained question, spinning, and chatting over Telegram, all while running three Strands agents at once (thinker, communicator, and disabled voice). Five lines of code connect a robot to an agent, and Strands supports over 40 robots in eight categories. She explains the four-layer architecture and hybrid cloud/edge design, where the agent decides what to do and the policy decides how. Her goal is a stepping stone to vision-language-action models as large as LLMs, so robots need less task-specific training.
