CASE STUDY
How Roborax took a mobile manipulation team from zero training data to a production-deployed policy in 90 days using a hybrid delivery model.
A mobile manipulation startup had a working hardware platform and a clear deployment target — assistive delivery in a hospital environment — but zero training data. They had spent two months trying to build an internal data collection capability and concluded it was not the right use of their engineering team’s time. They came to Roborax 90 days before a planned pilot deployment.
Cold-starting a mobile manipulation program means solving multiple problems simultaneously: operator training, environment replica construction, task design, quality framework definition, and pipeline integration — all before the first trajectory is captured. With 90 days to a pilot, there was no time for sequential problem-solving.
Roborax ran a hybrid program: a small dedicated team handled the complex navigation-plus-manipulation tasks in a purpose-built hospital environment replica, while a crowdsource pool handled high-volume simple navigation episodes. In 90 days, we delivered 15,000 full-episode trajectories spanning 8 task types across 3 environment configurations.
The client deployed a functional policy into a live hospital pilot within the 90-day window. The policy handled the primary task suite at above-threshold success rate on day one of deployment.
Related: Mobile manipulation solutions — Case studies.
The most important factor in a successful cold-start program is parallelising the setup work rather than sequencing it. Operator training, environment construction, task design, and pipeline integration can all begin simultaneously if the program manager has enough context from the client. Roborax’s program kickoff process is designed to extract that context in the first week and launch all workstreams in parallel — which is how a 90-day timeline from zero to deployment is achievable. Related: Mobile manipulation solutions — Case studies.
