Terraform for Humanoid Robotics Fleet Management on AWS
Provision humanoid robotics infrastructure with Terraform: fleet management, OTA updates, simulation clusters, logging, maps, and robotics APIs.
DevOps
Provision Physical AI infrastructure with Terraform: edge-cloud backends, robotics telemetry, IoT ingestion, and low-latency compute zones.
Physical AI — robotics, autonomous machines, and embodied agents — is one of the defining 2026 themes. These systems blur the line between hardware and software, and they need a low-latency cloud backbone for telemetry, model updates, and remote control. Terraform provisions that backbone repeatably across regions and edge locations.
This guide shows how to build a Physical AI backend on AWS with Terraform.
| Layer | AWS service |
|---|---|
| Device fleet | AWS IoT Core, IoT Device Management |
| Telemetry ingest | Kinesis Data Streams, IoT Rule Actions |
| Hot storage | DynamoDB, Timestream |
| Cold storage / replay | S3 + Athena |
| Edge compute | Wavelength, Local Zones, Outposts |
| Model deploy | SageMaker Edge, Greengrass |
resource "aws_iot_thing_type" "robot" {
name = "robot-v2"
thing_type_properties {
description = "Generation-2 mobile robot"
searchable_attributes = ["site", "model", "firmware"]
}
}
resource "aws_iot_policy" "robot" {
name = "robot-policy"
policy = jsonencode({
Version = "2012-10-17"
Statement = [{
Effect = "Allow"
Action = ["iot:Connect"]
Resource = "arn:aws:iot:${var.region}:${data.aws_caller_identity.me.account_id}:client/$${iot:Connection.Thing.ThingName}"
}, {
Effect = "Allow"
Action = ["iot:Publish"]
Resource = [
"arn:aws:iot:${var.region}:${data.aws_caller_identity.me.account_id}:topic/robots/$${iot:Connection.Thing.ThingName}/telemetry",
"arn:aws:iot:${var.region}:${data.aws_caller_identity.me.account_id}:topic/robots/$${iot:Connection.Thing.ThingName}/events"
]
}]
})
}
resource "aws_iot_provisioning_template" "robot" {
name = "robot-fleet-template"
provisioning_role_arn = aws_iam_role.iot_provisioning.arn
enabled = true
template_body = file("${path.module}/templates/robot.json")
}resource "aws_kinesis_stream" "telemetry" {
name = "robot-telemetry"
shard_count = 8
retention_period = 168 # 7 days
stream_mode_details {
stream_mode = "ON_DEMAND"
}
}
resource "aws_iot_topic_rule" "telemetry_to_kinesis" {
name = "robot_telemetry_to_kinesis"
enabled = true
sql = "SELECT *, topic(2) AS robot_id FROM 'robots/+/telemetry'"
sql_version = "2016-03-23"
kinesis {
role_arn = aws_iam_role.iot_to_kinesis.arn
stream_name = aws_kinesis_stream.telemetry.name
partition_key = "$${robot_id}"
}
}
resource "aws_timestreamwrite_database" "fleet" {
database_name = "robot_fleet"
}
resource "aws_timestreamwrite_table" "telemetry" {
database_name = aws_timestreamwrite_database.fleet.database_name
table_name = "telemetry"
retention_properties {
memory_store_retention_period_in_hours = 24
magnetic_store_retention_period_in_days = 365
}
}For autonomy controllers that need <10 ms latency:
data "aws_availability_zones" "wavelength" {
filter {
name = "zone-type"
values = ["wavelength-zone"]
}
}
resource "aws_subnet" "wavelength" {
vpc_id = var.vpc_id
cidr_block = "10.0.99.0/24"
availability_zone = data.aws_availability_zones.wavelength.names[0]
}
resource "aws_instance" "edge_inference" {
ami = data.aws_ami.deep_learning.id
instance_type = "g4dn.2xlarge"
subnet_id = aws_subnet.wavelength.id
}resource "aws_iot_thing_group" "fleet_us" {
name = "fleet-us"
}
resource "aws_greengrassv2_component_version" "vision_model" {
inline_recipe = jsonencode({
RecipeFormatVersion = "2020-01-25"
ComponentName = "com.acme.vision"
ComponentVersion = var.vision_model_version
Manifests = [{
Platform = { os = "linux", architecture = "aarch64" }
Lifecycle = { Run = "python3 -m vision_runner" }
Artifacts = [{ Uri = "s3://${aws_s3_bucket.models.bucket}/vision-${var.vision_model_version}.tar.gz" }]
}]
})
}latest to a robot fleet.Provision humanoid robotics infrastructure with Terraform: fleet management, OTA updates, simulation clusters, logging, maps, and robotics APIs.
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