Over-the-Air (OTA) Update

OTA 升级OTACommon

Updating a device's firmware, system, or models remotely over a network, without opening it up or plugging in a cable.

An OTA update means a device downloads and installs new software wirelessly, over Wi-Fi or cellular, first popularized in phones and cars. For a robot, what gets updated can be low-level firmware (the code in driver boards or joint motors), the higher-level operating system, or even a motion-control policy or large model's weights. It solves a specific problem: once machines are sold and scattered across many sites, how do you keep fixing bugs and adding features without shipping them back to the factory or sending an engineer out? Building OTA properly means handling rollback after a power loss, version verification, and staged rollout — get it wrong, and a failed update can leave a robot unable to boot. At the mass-production and scaled-deployment stage, OTA capability is often treated as a sign that a product has matured.

ExampleA humanoid robot maker pushes a new motion-control policy to robots already delivered to customers; the user taps update in an app, the robot downloads it, and gains the new behavior after a restart.

Also called: OTA, over-the-air update
Related: Firmware · Driver (Device Driver) · Mass Production · Scaled Deployment · On-Device / Edge Deployment
Sources: Over-the-air update - Wikipedia