Crickit is designed to make it easier to build robotics projects. See Ladyada's Crickit Manifesto for the product's background story.

When used with a WiFi capable Feather like the HUZZAH ESP8266, your robot project can communicate with Adafruit IO. If you build a controller that can do so as well, it's easy to see how you could use Adafruit IO to link the two, providing remote control of your project.

A bit more involved idea would be to have a more capable computer (like your desktop, laptop, or even a cloud based instance) read data from feeds that your robot publishes to, and send back commands on other feeds. What software could be doing that on the bigger computer? It could be something as simple as a small Python script, or as elaborate as something driven by deep learning and AI.

Adafruit IO lets you do all that, while at the same time storing the data that gets sent to feeds. For instance you could have soil-condition monitoring devices throughout a garden that send measurements to Adafruit IO. Using actions, that data could be used to send commands back to the devices to control water valves and the like. However you would be collecting historical data at the same time that can be used to perform higher level analysis.