inVia Robotics occasionally performs an update or upgrade to the inVia Robotics Goods to Person platform on the customer premise. The upgrade can apply to the services or applications on either the inVia servers or the robots themselves. These updates can be in regard to new (internal or external) features, robot picking performance gains, robot reliability increases, or bug fixes leading to a more performant and reliable system.
inVia establishes a weekly maintenance window in the customer warehouse to perform and test these updates outside of normal picking hours as to not affect the productivity required by the customer during the day.
The weekly maintenance window is not always used, but having a regularly scheduled time each week gives inVia the ability to move forward on updates in an agreed upon manner with minimal overhead on the customer.
The inVia code release process for robots is slightly different than for the inVia control server itself, so this process is split into two separate phases.
Phase 1: inVia code release process at inVia HQ
- Pre-Release Candidate—all engineering changes affecting all inVia Control Services or Robot Services are tested in the inVia warehouse. Then, engineers confirm that all modifications have been made to maintain or enhance performance, functionality, or feature set while ensuring that they all function cohesively.
- Release Candidate—Engineers submit software changes to Operations to perform full system validation and regression testing. Based on performance and reliability thresholds or feature-set functionality, Operations decides whether the latest Release Candidate should be demoted to Pre-Release for additional changes or promoted to be released to production.
Phase 2: Release candidate applied to inVia control server
- inVia Soft Release of approved RC for inVia Control Service only
- inVia Soft Release of approved RC for inVia Control Service and Robot Software
- inVia Soft Release of approved RC for inVia Robots only